Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and AHV > Introduction
The XC Family hyperconverged solution combines storage, compute, networking, and virtualization into an industry-proven appliance based on a Dell EMC PowerEdge x86 server running Nutanix software. The XC systems use Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) to provide a unified pool of storage from all appliances across the cluster by using techniques such as mirroring, replication, autotiering, error detection, failover, and automatic recovery. XC Family systems provide storage through multiple protocols such as NFS, SMB, and iSCSI while using standard network infrastructure.
The XC Family encompasses XC Series appliances and XC Core nodes. XC Core nodes use the same PowerEdge hardware and software as the XC Series appliances, while the HCI software is licensed and supported directly by Nutanix. This separation enables license portability across infrastructure components and separate hardware and software upgrades and support throughout their life cycle.
Note: The XC systems are not off-the-shelf PowerEdge systems—the processor, memory, drives, firmware, and BIOS are tailored for Nutanix.