George Crump

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

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When evaluating the data protection capabilities of a vSAN alternative, understanding vSAN snapshots is as crucial as ensuring that it offers high performance and scalability. Although many vSAN solutions provide granular protection and recovery options, the ability to recover entire environments in one step—macro recovery—is equally significant. Without it, IT teams may struggle with hundreds of individual VM recoveries, resulting in excessive downtime and operational disruption.

Understanding vSAN Snapshot Limitations

The first step in understanding vSAN snapshots is learning what level of granularity they provide. Most vSAN platforms, such as VMware vSAN and Nutanix AOS Storage, operate at the virtual machine (VM) level concerning snapshots. In these environments, snapshots are generally managed per VM, allowing for the restoration of individual VMs and potentially even files when necessary.

Granular recovery is an essential operational feature—IT teams require the capability to recover a single deleted file or restore an application VM that was accidentally corrupted. However, when disaster strikes on a larger scale, such as:

  • A ransomware attack that encrypts workloads or dozens of VMs
  • A storage system failure affecting multiple VMs
  • A major misconfiguration or corruption event

IT teams must recover individual VMs and entire business units, departments, or data center environments. Unfortunately, neither VMware vSAN nor Nutanix AOS Storage offers macro recovery capabilities, forcing IT administrators to restore each VM individually, significantly extending downtime.

The granular structure of many vSAN alternative snapshots complicates protecting the entire environment. Although VMs can typically be grouped by “tag” for protection, the underlying software continues to operate per VM. It must manage dozens or even hundreds of individual snapshots per snapshot interval in the background.

VM-only granularity also makes it challenging to achieve consistent states across environments, not only among VMs but also in infrastructure-wide settings such as networking and other configurations. If these settings fall out of sync or go unrecorded, recovery becomes more challenging and prolongs the time needed to return to normal operations.

Lastly, VM-only granularity increases the load on metadata. Because executing a snapshot of a workload may lead to dozens of managed instances, metadata management becomes complex and bloated. This complexity is why most vSAN solutions limit the number of active snapshots per VM.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots Macro Protection Capabilities

Macro recovery allows IT teams to restore entire groups of workloads at once—whether it’s a collection of business units, dozens of branch offices, or a multi-tenant environment. Protecting and recovering these entities in a single movement is essential because it provides:

  1. Faster recovery from large-scale failures – Instead of recovering hundreds of VMs manually, macro recovery restores an entire encapsulated environment, including environmental settings, in one data-consistent step, significantly reducing downtime.
  2. Streamlined Metadata Management – Since one snapshot can now represent a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand VMs, metadata is much less burdensome on the operating environment. Macro snapshots enable IT to execute snapshots almost continuously without any impact on performance.
  3. Stronger ransomware protection – Cyberattacks don’t just target single VMs; they encrypt entire workloads. Macro recovery enables point-in-time restoration of entire environments, allowing organizations to roll back to a known good state within minutes.
  4. Multi-tenancy protection – In environments where multiple departments or customers operate on shared infrastructure, macro recovery ensures that a single tenant’s data can be restored without impacting others.
  5. Simplified Site Recovery — Macro data protection and recovery also tackle one of the key challenges organizations encounter during a site disaster: synchronizing infrastructure configuration data, network information, and hypervisor configuration settings with the data being replicated. Without macro protection, the recovery process is manual, hindering the effort and failing to meet recovery time objectives (RTO).

How VergeIO Enables Macro Protection

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

Understanding vSAN snapshots will help you realize the advantages of VergeIO’s approach. Unlike VMware vSAN and Nutanix, VergeIO’s VergeOS includes built-in macro recovery capabilities. With infrastructure-wide and Virtual Data Center (VDC) -level snapshots, IT teams can capture entire environments—not just individual VMs. These snapshots simultaneously capture all metadata and configuration information alongside the data, ensuring consistency. As a result, VergeOS can restore the entire infrastructure or a complete workload in a single operation.

Granularity isn’t sacrificed for VergeOS’s macro recoverability. IT can drill into an instance-wide or VDC snapshot and extract an individual VM for recovery. Individual VM snapshots can be mounted as drives to the production version of the VM, enabling single-file recovery simply by copying data between drives.

At the same time, VergeOS can snapshot at the VM level, but with VergeOS, VM-level snapshots are the exception, not the rule. A VM-level snapshot can be executed for special situations where a VM needs extra protection or longer retention times.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

VergeFS snapshots are remarkably efficient, allowing frequent snapshots without compromising performance. High frequency without any performance impact ensures that organizations can always revert to a recent, clean state, whether recovering from a ransomware attack, a catastrophic failure, or retrieving a document that a user accidentally overwrote just 15 minutes prior.

Get Macro Protection, Move Beyond VM-Only Granularity

Granular recovery is essential, but macro recovery is a powerful complement when minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. If you’re evaluating vSAN alternatives, ensure the solutions you consider can restore entire environments quickly and efficiently—not just individual files or VMs. Check out this VMware Alternative data protection checklist.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots: Free Expert Webinar

For IT professionals encountering similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar with storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer, George Crump.

This webinar will comprehensively compare VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, assisting IT teams in making informed decisions regarding cost, performance, and data resilience.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

🔗 Learn More & Register

A Double-Protected VMware Alternative

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A double-protected VMware alternative allows organizations to lower licensing expenses and enhance their data resilience. With the rise of infrastructure threats and the need for continuity of operations, IT should leverage this infrastructure shift to boost its recovery capabilities from accidental file deletions, server or drive failures, site disasters, and long-term data retention needs.

A robust VMware alternative must provide two layers of protection: real-time infrastructure resilience and long-term data protection. VergeIO and Storware work together to create a double-protected solution, combining real-time safeguards like ioGuardian, ioClone (snapshots), and ioReplicate with long-term retention and archival capabilities provided by Storware Backup and Recovery.

This approach delivers the strongest data protection strategy and allows IT teams to leverage existing server and backup storage hardware, reducing costs and eliminating the need for rip-and-replace upgrades.

First Layer of Protection: Built-in Infrastructure Resiliency

Many VMware alternatives rely heavily on third-party backup solutions for protection, leaving gaps in immediate recovery and real-time failure resilience. A double-protected VMware alternative must first integrate infrastructure-native data protection that ensures data availability without relying on backups for everyday failures.

ioGuardian: Continuous Failure Detection and Recovery

The foundation of VergeIO’s built-in resiliency is ioGuardian, which proactively monitors infrastructure health and automatically reroutes workloads in the event of drive or node failures. Unlike traditional instant-recovery solutions that require IT intervention, ioGuardian provides real-time, automated protection that keeps applications running without delays or downtime. It also protects against multiple simultaneous drive failures, ensuring data remains accessible even in worst-case scenarios.

ioClone: Instant, Space-Efficient Snapshots

Snapshots are a critical component of an effective data resilience strategy, but most legacy HCI and VMware solutions create performance bottlenecks when snapshots accumulate. VergeIO’s ioClone snapshots eliminate this issue by providing instant, space-efficient, performance-neutral snapshots that IT can use to recover from accidental deletions and system corruption quickly. Snapshots can even be used to recover from ransomware attacks because they are read-only from inception.

ioReplicate: Multi-Site Data Resiliency

VergeIO offers ioReplicate, an efficient, WAN-optimized replication engine that enables real-time or scheduled replication to offsite locations for organizations needing geo-redundancy. This ensures that even in the event of a primary site failure, IT teams can rapidly failover and restore operations from a secondary location.

Global Inline Deduplication

VergeOS features integrated global inline deduplication, the foundation for both ioClone and ioReplicate. This technology decreases storage consumption by ensuring that unique data blocks are written, greatly enhancing efficiency. Removing redundant data globally improves storage performance and maximizes available capacity, making snapshots and replication operations even more cost-effective.

Second Layer of Protection: Long-Term Data Retention

A double-protected VMware alternative requires more than built-in resiliency and data availability in real-time. IT teams also need a long-term data protection strategy to defend against data corruption, cyber threats, and to meet compliance requirements.

Storware Backup and Recovery: Deep Integration with VergeIO

Storware extends VergeIO’s protection by offering long-term backup retention, compliance archiving, and multi-destination backup support, allowing organizations to meet regulatory and business continuity requirements. Unlike traditional backup solutions, Storware is directly integrated into VergeOS, enabling seamless backup of ioClone snapshots and leveraging VergeIO’s changed block tracking (CBT) for faster, storage-efficient backups.

To learn more about VergeIO’s and Storware’s Double Protection and to see it in action, watch our on-demand webinar, “Exit VMware, Retain Server and Backup Hardware.”

Use Existing Server and Backup Storage Hardware

VergeOS enhances flexibility by supporting a broad range of existing server hardware. With its intelligent resource allocation and ability to run on nearly any x86 hardware purchased in the last six years, IT teams can continue using their current infrastructure instead of refreshing everything simultaneously.

One of the most costly aspects of transitioning off of VMware is replacing backup infrastructure due to compatibility limitations with new platforms. Storware removes this concern by supporting a wide range of backup storage hardware, including:

  • Existing NAS/SAN backup storage
  • Object storage (on-prem and cloud-based)
  • Backup appliances from vendors like Rubrik, ExaGrid, and Dell EMC

Storware: Keep Your Existing Backup Storage

Storware enables IT teams to continue using their existing backup storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to purchase new backup appliances. Whether organizations rely on on-premises storage or cloud-based repositories, Storware provides seamless backup and archival capabilities. This flexibility helps businesses reduce costs while ensuring backup operations remain efficient and secure.

ioOptimize: Extending Hardware Lifespan

VergeOS includes ioOptimize, a technology designed to maximize the efficiency of existing hardware. By intelligently distributing workloads, optimizing storage, and reducing system overhead, ioOptimize allows organizations to extend the life of their current infrastructure while also improving performance. IT teams can repurpose aging servers and storage systems rather than retiring them early, ultimately reducing costs and making infrastructure refresh cycles more flexible.

The Most Data-Resilient VMware Alternative

VergeIO believes that data protection and resiliency is a shared responsibility. The combination of VergeIO and Storware creates the most resilient VMware alternative, delivering:

  • Real-time failure detection and recovery with ioGuardian
  • Instant, space-efficient snapshots with ioClone
  • Multi-site data replication with ioReplicate
  • Fast, storage-efficient backups with Storware’s CBT integration
  • Long-term retention and archival capabilities using existing backup storage hardware
  • Extended server lifecycle with ioOptimize

With VergeIO’s built-in resilience and Storware’s long-term data protection, IT teams can confidently transition from VMware without sacrificing security, availability, or infrastructure flexibility.

Conclusion

A VMware exit should not come at the cost of data protection or hardware flexibility. VergeIO and Storware provide a double-protected VMware alternative that delivers real-time resilience and long-term security, ensuring IT teams reduce costs, enhance uptime, and retain control over their infrastructure.

Organizations looking to exit VMware now have a cost-effective, highly available, and deeply resilient alternative that protects both today and into the future.

UCI Enables VMware Exits

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UCI enables VMware exits by providing a flexible, efficient infrastructure that allows organizations to retain their existing servers, storage, and backup hardware while modernizing their IT environment. VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) platform, VergeOS, empowers businesses to make the transition efficiently while improving the performance and longevity of their current hardware investments.

How UCI Enables VMware Exits Without Hardware Refreshes

Various VMware alternatives consist of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. Due to strict hardware compatibility requirements and bundled hardware and software purchases, these designs force organizations to upgrade their servers and storage sooner than necessary. This often results in businesses undertaking expensive and unnecessary upgrades. Furthermore, HCI’s limitations—such as insufficient storage performance, inflexible scaling options, and the difficulty of a seamless transition from a three-tier to a converged architecture—often tether organizations to their outdated architectures.

UCI enables VMware exits

In contrast, UCI enables VMware exits by eliminating these constraints. VergeOS supports nearly any server hardware purchased in the last five years and allows for mixed-node configurations. Whether your data center includes blade servers, rack-mounted servers, or a mix of vendors, VergeOS adapts to your infrastructure. This flexibility means you can retain your existing hardware and maximize its service life while transitioning to a modernized architecture.

UCI enables VMware exits

UCI Enables VMware Exits and Extends Hardware Lifecycle

A key advantage of VergeOS is that UCI enables VMware exits while enhancing the efficiency of existing hardware. VergeOS often improves the performance of aging servers and storage systems by optimizing resource utilization and streamlining operations, extending their lifecycle. This not only reduces immediate hardware costs but also delays future refreshes.

Additionally, VergeOS includes built-in data resiliency to protect against failures due to aging hardware. Its advanced data redundancy features ensure that even if a server fails, your data remains intact and your operations continue without interruption.

Advanced Storage Features with VergeOS

VergeOS provides a robust software-defined storage layer, VergeFS, which offers enterprise-class features that further demonstrate how UCI enables VMware exits without compromise:

  • Global Inline Deduplication: Reduce storage usage and improve efficiency.
  • Unchangeable, Unlimited Snapshots: Enhance data protection and recovery options.
  • Tiered Storage and Live Migration: Automatically move data between storage tiers for optimal performance and cost management. VergeOS also allows live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between storage tiers and server nodes, ensuring maximum flexibility for evolving workloads.

With these capabilities, organizations can consolidate multiple storage systems into a unified solution and eliminate the complexity of managing disparate arrays.

Comprehensive Backup and Archive with Storware

Data protection is critical during any infrastructure transition, and VergeIO’s partnership with Storware ensures businesses can continue to safeguard their data effectively. Investing in backup infrastructure, especially backup storage, is significant, making maximizing its lifespan and utility essential. Storware Backup and Recovery integrates directly with VergeOS to provide:

  • Long-Term Data Retention and Archive: Extends the storage of critical data in existing backup hardware or cloud-based object repositories.
  • Efficient Backups with CBT: Use VergeOS’s changed block tracking (CBT) and snapshots to reduce backup times and storage requirements.
  • Support for Existing Backup Hardware: Retain your investment in Rubrik, EMC Data Domain, Exagrid, or similar appliances, further maximizing ROI.
UCI enables VMware exits

Together, VergeOS and Storware ensure a VMware exit that minimizes disruption, reduces costs, and secures long-term data retention.

See the VergeIO/Storware solution in action register for our webinar and demonstration: Exit VMware, Retain Server and Backup Hardware

How VergeIO and Storware Deliver Unparalleled Data Protection and Resilience

VergeIO and Storware work together to provide unmatched data protection, data resilience, and long-term data retention for organizations transitioning from VMware. VergeOS includes advanced high-availability features, robust drive failure protection, and unlimited snapshots to safeguard critical workloads. Additionally, VergeOS’s ioGuardian offers continuous monitoring and ensures rapid responses to potential issues, further enhancing operational stability. VergeOS enables infrastructure to become the first line of recovery often seamlessly maintaining operations through multiple simultaneous hardware failures.

Storware complements VergeOS by integrating with its snapshots and changed block tracking (CBT) capabilities, enabling highly efficient and reliable backups. Beyond backups, Storware excels in cataloging data for long-term archival purposes. It presents organizations with a searchable catalog that simplifies data retrieval and ensures compliance with regulatory requirements. Storware becomes the point of recovery for software failures or human mistakes. Together, VergeIO and Storware form a comprehensive solution that protects against hardware failures, ensures data integrity, and provides easy access to archived information.

UCI Enables VMware Exits While Future-Proofing IT

UCI Enables VMware Exits

Unlike traditional HCI solutions, VergeIO’s UCI architecture doesn’t just solve today’s problems; it prepares your IT environment for future challenges. By improving the performance of current hardware, extending its lifecycle, and consolidating infrastructure, UCI enables VMware exits while empowering organizations to build an agile, cost-efficient data center.

VergeOS also protects your data with advanced resiliency features that guard against hardware failures, ensuring uninterrupted operations. Combined with Storware’s comprehensive backup and archival solutions, VergeIO provides a complete, no-compromise alternative to VMware.

Conclusion

UCI enables VMware exits by allowing organizations to retain their current hardware while modernizing their IT infrastructure. With VergeOS, businesses gain flexibility, enhanced hardware performance, and advanced storage capabilities. Paired with Storware’s robust data protection and long-term archival solutions, UCI represents a cost-effective, future-ready approach to IT transformation.

Unlocking ROI with Ultra-High-Density Drives

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Unlocking ROI with Ultra-High-Density Drives

In 2025, storage and computing infrastructure will undergo a step-level change, and unlocking ROI with Ultra-High-Density drives will be a key initiative for IT planners. Ultra-high-density drives, such as Solidigm’s industry-leading 122TB models, are redefining the cost dynamics of data centers. These drives set a new bar for capacity, enabling organizations to consolidate infrastructure, reduce costs, and achieve significant returns on investment (ROI). However, achieving these benefits depends on selecting the right infrastructure software to tap into their potential fully.

Ultra-High-Density Drives Means Less Drives

Ultra-high-density drives reduce how many drives IT needs to deploy per server to meet capacity requirements, even if the price per TB is slightly higher than lower-capacity drives. Fewer drives can:

  • Lower Power Requirements: Consolidating data into fewer drives reduces the energy footprint of storage systems.
  • Enabling Converged Infrastructures: High-density drives should extend the suitability of converged infrastructures like Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), which can now deliver double-digit PBs of capacity in three to four servers or nodes.
  • Reducing the number of Servers: These high-capacity drives allow IT to deploy fewer servers to achieve similar or greater storage capacity, resulting in lower overall costs.

Organizations switching to high-density drives can expect a more energy-efficient data center that consumes less physical footprint and lowers maintenance requirements. VergeFS, part of VergeOS, enables this consolidation by delivering high performance with fewer drives, unlike traditional systems that depend on the parallelism of high drive counts to deliver acceptable performance.

Ultra-High-Density Drives Means Fewer Servers

Compute comprises a series of servers acting as nodes within a cluster. Depending on the organization’s computing and storage requirements, they may have one cluster or dozens. Ultra-high-density drives allow organizations to consolidate storage infrastructure by reducing the number of servers required per cluster. In the same way, compute demand can be met by using multi-processor servers with hundreds of cores. The benefits of fewer servers are:

  • Lower Power Consumption: Fewer servers use less electricity, which reduces operational and power costs.
  • Lower Upfront Capital Costs: Consolidating capacity into fewer servers reduces the need for additional hardware purchases.
  • Reduced Networking Infrastructure Investment: Fewer servers require fewer networking cards, switches, and cables.

To maximize these savings, organizations must adopt software that encourages high-performance, high-core-count servers capable of handling the expanded capacity offered by ultra-high-density drives. Legacy pricing models that charge by the number of cores or TBs may lead to software licensing that eliminates the cost savings created by hardware innovation.

From a technology perspective, legacy infrastructure software solutions may falter under this design because they require high levels of parallelism to deliver acceptable performance and data resiliency. Fewer drives and servers mean fewer available resources for parallelism. Parallelism is good, but IT planners can’t design highly dense infrastructure if their software vendors over depend on it. Modern infrastructure software like VergeOS is essential for realizing dense architectures’ technical efficiencies while having a business model that rewards their deployment.

Ultra-High-Density Drives Deliver Scale-In

One of the most pivotal benefits of ultra-high-density drives is their ability to scale capacity within existing servers. Instead of adding servers or storage hardware, organizations can grow capacity by adding or replacing drives in their existing servers.

  • Cost-Effective Scaling: Expanding capacity within existing servers eliminates the need for new hardware investments.
  • Drive Type Flexibility: Modern infrastructure software, like VergeOS, allows the support of mixing drive types and capacities, allowing seamless upgrades without disrupting operations.

Using a standard 2U, 24-drive bay server as an example, IT can start with four servers, half populated with 60TB drives for a raw capacity of 2.8PBs. Then, in the future, as capacity demands increase, they can add 122TB drives or whatever drive capacity is the state of the art at that time. This flexibility enables IT teams to adopt a phased approach to ultra-high-density drive deployment, gradually increasing capacity while optimizing costs.

The software must support this flexibility. VergeOS’ ioOptimize feature enables customers to add drives to existing servers, add servers of different generations, or even shrink cluster size if fewer servers result from a data center density initiative.

Infrastructure Software: The Critical ROI Enabler

Achieving maximum ROI from ultra-high-density drives requires software that eliminates inefficiencies and unlocks their full potential. Legacy solutions often struggle with extracting the performance potential of these drives and the slow rebuild times required if one fails, leading to underutilization and slower ROI realization.

VergeOS, a modern Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) solution, is designed to optimize high-density storage deployments. With features like:

  • Synchronous Deduplicated Mirroring: Ensures faster rebuild times and minimizes downtime.
  • ioOptimize: Supports mixing drive types and capacities, enabling phased upgrades and efficient scaling.

VergeOS empowers organizations to fully harness the benefits of ultra-high-density drives and maintain their performance even though there are fewer drives. In the screenshots below we generated over 1 million read IOPS and 470K write IOPS using 64K block sizes.

470K Write IOPS using 64K Blocks
1 Million IOPS using 64K blocks

Additional ROI: Exiting VMware and Eliminating Dedicated AFAs

Transitioning to VergeOS unlocks the benefits of ultra-high-density drives and enables organizations to exit the VMware ecosystem entirely and, over time, replace dedicated all-flash arrays (AFA). By replacing VMware with VergeOS, IT teams eliminate traditional virtualization platforms’ complexity and high costs. This shift simplifies operations, reduces licensing fees, and allows IT to remove “finding a VMware alternative” from their strategic to-do list.
As we will demonstrate in our upcoming webinar, “Storage And Infrastructure Strategies,” VergeFS can deliver millions of IOPS of performance with just a handful of these drives while improving data protection and resiliency. These additional layers of ROI position VergeOS as a comprehensive solution for infrastructure consolidation and virtualization modernization.
The combined ROI of VergeOS can reduce infrastructure costs by 70% or more while simplifying strategic and day-to-day operations. For example, in a recent webinar, now available on-demand, we discussed how IT can execute a complete recovery from a disaster in three clicks and with minimal data loss.

The Long-Term ROI Impact

Ultra-high-density drives don’t just lower initial costs; they provide lasting benefits over time:

  • Operational Efficiency: Reduced hardware, energy consumption, and maintenance lead to sustained savings.
  • Scalability: The ability to expand within existing servers reduces the need for frequent hardware refresh cycles.
  • Sustainability: A smaller data center footprint aligns with environmental goals, improving organizational environmental metrics.

Conclusion

Unlocking ROI with ultra-high-density drives requires the right software to tap into their density, performance, and scalability potential. VergeOS unlocks the these drives’ potential, enabling organizations to consolidate infrastructure, reduce costs, and future-proof their data centers.

InterBel Telephone Achieves Seamless Infrastructure Refresh with VergeIO, Cutting Costs by Nearly 45%

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For Immediate Release

Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tuesday, January 7th — VergeIO, a leader in ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI), is proud to announce that InterBel Telephone, a trusted telecommunications provider in northwest Montana, has successfully modernized its IT infrastructure with VergeIO’s groundbreaking platform. This transformative upgrade streamlined operations and came in significantly under budget, saving nearly 45% compared to revised projections.

Faced with aging infrastructure and skyrocketing software licensing fees, InterBel sought a flexible, cost-effective solution to replace its Cisco UCS and NetApp environment. With hardware reaching end-of-life and escalating costs from traditional virtualization platforms such as VMware, the telecom provider needed a modern solution to ensure reliable, efficient customer service.

Tom Rasmussen, Manager of Information Technology at InterBel Telephone, explained, “The Broadcom acquisition of VMware hit us hard, with licensing costs jumping by 30%. It was a punch in the gut. VergeIO stood out with its simplicity, flexibility, and ability to run on the hardware we already trusted.”

The project was built on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers, leveraging VergeIO’s VergeOS platform—a powerful ultraconverged infrastructure solution—for an all-flash production environment. Another node was configured using VergeIO’s ioGuardian feature for disaster recovery, providing a robust backup and failover solution that can mix SSD and hard disk drives seamlessly. This configuration maximized performance while ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency for the future.

Rasmussen highlighted the straightforward implementation process: “VergeIO was like reading an open book. It took under two hours to deploy in our lab, and adding nodes was seamless. Compared to the complexity of Cisco UCS and NetApp, VergeIO made the process remarkably simple.”

The VergeIO deployment delivered immediate benefits, including:

  • Cost Savings: Instead of exceeding their budget by 30% with VMware, InterBel completed the project using VergeIO at just 28% of their original budget—achieving an impressive 45% savings compared to VMware.
  • Performance Improvements: An all-flash environment enhanced speed and reliability beyond what the legacy systems could offer.
  • Streamlined Management: A single-pane-of-glass interface simplified operations for InterBel’s one-person IT team.
  • Scalability: VergeOS allowed the addition of compute-only nodes and flexible storage options for future growth.

Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO, commented, “We are thrilled to support InterBel in achieving their infrastructure goals. Our ultraconverged platform is designed to simplify IT operations and deliver exceptional value, enabling organizations like InterBel to focus on delivering superior services to their customers.”

Today, InterBel is poised for continued growth and operational excellence. VergeIO’s UCI ensures that their IT environment remains scalable, cost-effective, and ready to meet the evolving demands of their telecom services.

About VergeIO

VergeIO delivers the future of virtualization via an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) solution that collapses the entire IT stack—virtualization, storage, and networking—into a single platform, VergeOS. This approach improves efficiency, enhances data resiliency, and reduces costs while simplifying IT operations. VergeIO empowers organizations to achieve unmatched scalability and performance.

About InterBel Telephone

Founded in 1962, InterBel Telephone is a telecommunications cooperative dedicated to providing advanced connectivity solutions to the communities of northwest Montana. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and a community-focused approach, InterBel continues to deliver high-quality service and innovative solutions to its customers.

Media Contact

Judy Smith
JPR
judy.smith@jpr.com
818-522-9673

For more information about VergeIO and its solutions, visit www.verge.io.
For more information about InterBel Telephone, visit www.interbel.com.

The ROI of High-Performance HCI

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The ROI of High-Performance HCI would be a compelling alternative to the high cost of dedicated All-Flash Arrays. However, as application performance demands increase, many HCI solutions struggle to deliver the required performance, scalability, and efficiency. Legacy HCI solutions struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern mainstream applications, let alone today’s high-performance applications. The result is that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which has long promised simplification and cost savings, has never delivered on this promise.

The ROI of High-Performance HCI is achieved only when these platforms meet the demands of today’s workloads. Applications such as virtual desktops and databases require high performance and low latency—capabilities that many legacy HCI platforms fail to provide due to architectural inefficiencies.

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) is High-Performance HCI

the ROI of high-performance HCI

UCI is the next evolution in data center software, designed to overcome the limitations of legacy HCI by deeply integrating virtualization, storage, and networking into a single codebase. Unlike traditional HCI, where storage is often a second-class citizen running as a virtual machine, UCI treats storage as a first-class service, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization. By addressing these challenges head-on, UCI solutions like VergeOS deliver superior performance and unparalleled ROI.

Want to learn more? Register for VergeIO’s upcoming webinar to see these high-performance results live on cost-effective hardware:
👉 Live Demonstration: Break the Performance Shackles of HCI

Eliminating Expensive Storage Hardware

UCI improves the ROI of high-performance HCI by eliminating expensive dedicated storage controller hardware and vendor-marked-up storage media, which can cost up to 10 times more than off-the-shelf consumer-grade SSDs. These enterprise-class drives are designed with features like capacitors and error-correcting code (ECC) to ensure data integrity, but they significantly inflate infrastructure costs.

Legacy All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) and HCI solutions depend heavily on these specialized components because they rely on the hardware for data resiliency and verification. In contrast, UCI solutions like VergeOS integrate these functions into the software, ensuring data resiliency and integrity without depending on expensive, proprietary hardware. This software-first mentality also enables UCI platforms to mix hardware from different vendors and generations, providing greater flexibility for organizations to scale and upgrade their infrastructure without forklift overhauls.

Matching and Surpassing All-Flash Array Features

Maintaining UCI’s improvements to the ROI of high-performance HCI requires that UCI platforms like VergeOS match and surpass the feature set of traditional all-flash arrays. Enterprises have come to expect capabilities such as:

the ROI of high-performance HCI
  • Unlimited snapshots without performance degradation: VergeOS supports instant snapshots without impacting IOPS or latency, allowing IT teams to back up and restore data seamlessly. VergeOS snapshots go beyond traditional snapshots because they are actually deduplicated clones, providing independence and scalability between snapshot generations.
  • Global Inline Deduplication: VergeOS performs global inline deduplication without slowing down I/O operations, enabling organizations to maximize storage efficiency without sacrificing performance. Unlike most deduplication technologies, which are added as an afterthought to the software and introduce latency, VergeOS’s deduplication was integrated from day one and has no noticeable impact on performance. Global deduplication also makes disaster recovery data transfers more efficient by reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent, particularly in many-to-one disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Replication to remote sites: Built-in replication ensures data can be efficiently copied to offsite locations, supporting robust disaster recovery strategies. When combined with VergeOS Virtual Data Centers, which encapsulate the entire data center, replication provides a simple and comprehensive solution for failover and recovery.

Traditionally associated with high-end storage arrays, these features are fully integrated into VergeOS’s UCI platform. By providing these capabilities within a consolidated, software-driven solution, VergeOS simplifies operations and delivers unmatched value.

High Performance with Low Latency

A critical challenge to improving the ROI of high-performance HCI is delivering high performance while maintaining low latency. Many HCI platforms struggle under demanding workloads because they must balance virtual machine and storage responsibilities within the same infrastructure. UCI, by contrast, is architected to ensure resource optimization and eliminate contention. When storage performance demands are extreme, VergeOS can even dedicate servers to specific functions, i.e., compute-only, GPU-only, and storage-only nodes.

By treating storage as a first-class service within its hypervisor, VergeOS achieves consistently low latency and sub-millisecond response times, even under heavy load. This deep integration allows VergeOS to allocate resources intelligently, ensuring that both compute and storage operations run smoothly without interference. Whether running I/O-intensive workloads or supporting mission-critical applications, VergeOS delivers the performance and responsiveness needed to keep pace with future demands.

Real-World Proof: VergeOS in Action

The advantages of UCI ROI versus the ROI of high-performance HCI are best demonstrated through real-world testing. Recently, VergeIO published a benchmark showcasing the performance of VergeOS under demanding workloads. The test utilized eight servers costing less than $1,500 per node, demonstrating that high performance does not require high-cost infrastructure. Key results included:

  • 1.5 Million+ Read IOPS using 64K blocks
  • 24 GB/s of Write Throughput on a 25 GB/s network

It’s worth noting that VergeOS achieved these results using 64K block sizes, which provide a more realistic representation of enterprise workloads compared to the more commonly benchmarked 4K blocks. Again, these tests were performed on off-the-shelf servers configured well below the typical data center-class server.

Want to see these results live? Join VergeIO’s upcoming webinar to learn how VergeOS delivers high performance on affordable hardware:
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Conclusion: UCI Delivers The ROI of High-performance HCI

With UCI solutions like VergeOS, the ROI of High-Performance HCI is no longer a theoretical concept but a practical reality. By eliminating the dependency on expensive hardware, matching and surpassing the capabilities of traditional storage arrays, and delivering consistent low-latency performance, VergeOS enables organizations to meet the demands of modern workloads without breaking their budgets.

the ROI of high-performance HCI

UCI represents the logical evolution of infrastructure software, combining the simplicity of HCI with the performance and flexibility enterprises require. For organizations looking to consolidate operations, reduce costs, and scale efficiently, UCI is the path forward.