Live Webinar · Thursday, August 20, 2026
The Software-Defined Answer to Hardware Inflation
Enterprise storage prices climbed hard through 2026 and have stayed there. Omdia (formerly ESG) surveyed 400 IT buyers on what they are doing about it. Join the analyst who ran the study, see two live demonstrations, and take a copy of the report with you.
Your Presenters
Session Agenda
One hour, three parts, two of them live
The session opens with the research, moves to a practical evaluation checklist, and finishes on a working system. Each part stands on its own, so the hour holds up whether you arrive with a refresh plan in hand or you are still sizing up the problem.
Inside the Omdia Study
Simon Robinson walks through findings from 400 North American IT buyers, every one of them holding direct storage and infrastructure responsibility.
Why Prices Stay Where They Are
What separates this repricing from every prior storage shortage, and what the supply side has said publicly about the next two years.
How to Evaluate a Platform
A short checklist for judging any software-defined storage product against a market where component costs keep climbing.
Surviving a Node Failure
Dave Vincent takes down a node in a running VergeOS cluster to show how availability holds up without spare hardware sitting idle.
Moving Data Between Media
A live workload migrates across different drive types while it keeps serving users, with no outage window scheduled.
Ask the Analyst
Open questions to an industry analyst and two practitioners, with time reserved for procurement and architecture.
Who Should Attend
For the people absorbing the price increases
Storage administrators, infrastructure architects, virtualization leads, and the IT managers who approve refresh budgets. The session assumes you have felt the increases on a recent quote and want to know what other organizations are doing, rather than assuming you have already settled on an answer.
Procurement and finance partners who sign off on infrastructure spending will find the opening twenty minutes useful on their own, since that segment is analyst research rather than product content.
About the Research
The Omdia study
Omdia is a global technology research firm, and its storage practice includes the analyst team formerly known as Enterprise Strategy Group. This study surveyed 400 North American IT professionals with storage and infrastructure responsibility in May 2026, with 76 percent at senior management level or above. Every respondent qualified by already absorbing the price increases, so the study measures what affected organizations are doing rather than how many are affected.
Among technologies they are not currently using, respondents ranked software-defined storage first for significant investment as a direct response to the storage and memory shortage, ahead of all-flash, hybrid, object, and every other array architecture on the list. Simon Robinson conducted the research and presents it here. Every attendee receives a copy of the report, so registering puts the full study in your hands whether or not you make the live session.
About VergeIO
One code base instead of four products
VergeIO builds VergeOS, a private cloud operating system that combines virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection in a single code base rather than assembling them from separate products. It runs on standard servers, and it supports mixed drive types and mixed hardware generations inside the same environment.
Global inline deduplication runs across the entire storage pool rather than per volume, which raises the effective capacity of hardware already in the rack. Backup and disaster recovery run inside the same environment as primary workloads, removing a second set of arrays from the budget. Seventy-four percent of the buyers Omdia surveyed said that last move is what they are already trying to make.