Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and VMware vSphere > XC system architecture
The XC architecture is a scalable cluster of high-performance appliances, each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory, and local storage consisting of solid-state drives (SSDs), NVMe, or a combination of both. The CVM running on each node aggregates the storage resources and makes them available to all hosts through a fault-tolerant architecture. Each appliance runs virtual machines (VMs) like a standard hypervisor host.
The following figure shows the architecture of an XC node:
XC Family devices provide a hyperconverged platform that uses Nutanix DSF to share and present local storage to all the virtual machines in the cluster.
The following figure shows the general XC cluster architecture:
DSF virtualizes the storage across all nodes, and local storage for each XC Family node in the architecture is presented as one large pool of shared storage to the hypervisor. DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one other XC Family node to ensure cluster resiliency and availability. Because of the distributed and scalable nature of the XC architecture, the Nutanix CVM keeps the data from the distributed storage as close to the VM as possible (data locality) to provide optimal and consistent performance and ensure data availability.
The Nutanix CVMs in this solution are VMs running on the VMware ESXi hosts. These VMs have direct control of the drives on the ESXi hosts. The VMs come preconfigured with modest settings so that you can start using the storage platform with very little startup time.