4 Factors Leading to the Resurgence of the 3-Tier Data Center

The emergence of AI, changes in the virtualization landscape and the need for flexibility are among the drivers causing some organizations to consider a return to traditional three-tier architecture.

Often, IT trends follow a pendulum-like pattern: At first, everything is on-premises; then, “cloud-first” becomes hot; when those bills come due, organizations start migrating workloads back in house; and eventually, they find a comfortable equilibrium.

We’re seeing this pattern play out today in data center infrastructure, as some organizations that previously went all-in on hyperconvergence are now having second thoughts and taking steps to disaggregate their compute, storage and networking.

Here are four factors leading to the resurgence of the three-tier data center.

When organizations were implementing hyperconverged infrastructure several years ago, they could not have known that in 2025, one of the most important emerging use cases would be generative artificial intelligence. These solutions, of course, require terabytes upon terabytes of data. And processing typically requires high-performance GPUs, rather than the standard CPU nodes featured in HCI. In short, the design of hyperconvergence makes the technology a specifically bad fit for supporting AI workloads. At Dell, we’re seeing strong interest in Dell PowerStore, which delivers highly scalable, efficient primary storage; Dell PowerEdge servers, which offer GPU-accelerated compute platforms designed for AI training; and Dell PowerScale, for data lakehouses and unstructured data.

Recent shifts in the virtualization marketplace, driven by mergers and acquisitions as well as changes to licensing structures, have many business and IT leaders wary of situations where they are locked in with a single vendor for the bulk of their data center infrastructure. Some organizations are rethinking hyperconverged solutions that tie them to a single hypervisor or vendor ecosystem, favoring instead a three-tier data center architecture that offers more choice and control. In a three-tier environment, these organizations can select the hypervisor, storage, compute and networking platforms that best fit their evolving needs.

Adding one node that takes care of everything sounds extremely simple, and it is. But what happens when you need far more storage capacity than you do compute? Many organizations have already found the answer to this question: You end up paying a lot of money for compute capacity you can’t use. When organizations take a fresh look at their existing infrastructure — especially as they build out new infrastructure to support emerging use cases such as AI — they often discover that their simplicity gains have come at the expense of efficiency. Our own analysis of more than 9,000 VxRail clusters showed an average CPU utilization of around 20% and a memory utilization of around 35%; clearly, evidence of overprovisioning. Strategic three-tier investments can be better tailored to specific needs.

Hyperconvergence grew in popularity in part because data center administrators were overwhelmed trying to integrate, manage and maintain disconnected systems. The introduction of HCI offered something of an “easy button,” bringing unified management and unprecedented lifecycle simplicity that overburdened IT and business leaders found attractive. Today, however, three-tier environments have caught up. Advances in management,  orchestration, automation and other types of plug-ins, frameworks and integrations have dramatically simplified three-tier disaggregated architectures, leading to an experience that mimics the ease of HCI deployment. With modern data center tools, organizations no longer need to choose between simplicity, flexibility and efficiency. They can have all three.