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A mixed architecture is a combination of both the HCI and Independent architectures. As shown in Figure 3 there are some storages only nodes, compute only nodes, and HCI nodes as a part of the same PowerFlex cluster. This is a desirable architecture when working with an existing compute infrastructure and adding high-performance software-defined infrastructure. This can also be a starting point for a two-layer deployment design as external workloads are migrated to PowerFlex.