How to use HCI and Hard Drives to Fight Data Center Inflation
Watch a running VM move from flash to hard drives and back without going offline, and see how VergeOS runs most workloads on hard drives at a fraction of the cost of flash.
Your Presenters
George Crump
Industry Analyst | Founder, Storage Switzerland
Dave Vincent
Technical Solutions Strategist, VergeIO
What You Will See
Data Center Inflation Reaches the Drive Bay
Flash and memory prices climbed 70 to 95 percent in the first half of 2026. See what that does to your next refresh and why AI demand keeps the pressure on.
All-Flash by Default Is a Budget Decision
Every HCI platform ships all-flash, so every workload pays flash prices. Learn how much of your environment needs that performance.
How VergeOS Makes Hard Drives Perform
Cluster-wide read prefetching, write reordering, RAM caching next to the VM and global inline deduplication turn a pool of hard drives into fast HCI storage.
Pick the Tier and Change Your Mind
Move running VMs between flash and hard drives on command, in either direction, with no downtime and no maintenance window.
Flash to Hard Drive and Back
Dave Vincent moves a live workload to the hard drive tier, runs it there and returns it to flash, with the VM online the whole time.
Protect High-Capacity Drives
See how parallel rebuilds, frequent snapshots and ioGuardian protect data on large hard drives, followed by live Q&A with both presenters.
Built for Teams Facing a 2026 Refresh
This session is for infrastructure architects, IT managers and systems engineers pricing a server or storage refresh at today’s component costs. If your last flash quote came in far above the one before it, or your HCI vendor sells only all-flash nodes, you will leave with a plan to put each workload on the media it needs and save flash for the workloads that earn it.
Increase in flash and memory prices through the first half of 2026
Cache hit rate of VergeOS server-side RAM caching compared with array-side caching
API acknowledgment for a live move between storage tiers
Downtime or maintenance windows required to change a VM’s tier
Source: Storage Tiering is Not the Problem. Losing Control of It Is
Flash and Hard Drives in One HCI Platform
VergeOS unifies compute, storage and networking in a single code base. Its storage layer, VergeFS, runs flash and hard drives in the same cluster, with separate code written for the access patterns of each media type, global inline deduplication and a RAM cache in every server.
VergeOS licenses per server, so the capacity you save with deduplication and hard drives stays in your budget. Organizations run it as a unified alternative to VMware, Nutanix and Dell.
An Analyst View and a Live Lab
George Crump founded Storage Switzerland and spent years as an industry analyst covering every generation of storage media and the tiering schemes built around them. He opens with the economics of data center inflation and what they mean for your next refresh.
Dave Vincent is a Technical Solutions Strategist at VergeIO. He runs the live demo, moving a running workload between flash and hard drives in real time and showing the performance on both tiers.