St. Clair County RESA
Overcoming a 1-2-3 Infrastructure Punch
Summary
St. Clair County RESA took three hits at once: rising storage costs, Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes and a Cisco UCS environment with long hardware lead times. Instead of swapping one layer, the team replaced the whole stack with VergeOS. Deduplication jumped to 16:1, backups went from daily to hourly, a half-rack backup array disappeared, 20 tenants now serve themselves, and the project paid for itself in about two and a half years.
A search for a VMware replacement became a full IT modernization.
About St. Clair County RESA
St. Clair County RESA is one of Michigan’s 56 intermediate school districts. Its IT team serves as the centralized infrastructure backbone for five school districts, a local community college and seven municipalities, delivering cost-effective services that support everything from classroom instruction to video security across many geographically dispersed sites.
Before VergeOS, RESA ran a 14-node VMware environment across two data centers, with Cisco UCS compute, SolidFire storage arrays, and separate backup software writing to a dedicated QNAP array. Three problems arrived in quick succession, and the team came to call them the 1-2-3 punch.
Storage That Kept Getting More Expensive
RESA’s SolidFire arrays had replaced a legacy NetApp FAS system after the team hit the maximum of nine disk shelves and could no longer expand. SolidFire delivered the scale-out design RESA needed, but at a high price. Storage growth required one or two new storage nodes every year, and a five-year lifecycle triggered regular hardware refreshes. With a constrained public budget, the team had little room to absorb those rising costs.
Licensing Uncertainty After Broadcom
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware brought a wave of uncertainty. Licensing costs spiked, patches and updates were suspended, and customers faced a higher risk of audit notices. RESA evaluated Nutanix, Proxmox and Hyper-V. Each came with trade-offs in features, manageability or architecture, and none matched the performance, flexibility and operational maturity RESA’s school districts depend on.
Hardware That Could Not Keep Up
The Cisco UCS environment added its own pressure. The platform’s tight integration made it difficult to manage and slow to scale. When components failed or upgrades were due, lead times were long and unpredictable, and hardware maintenance costs weighed heavily on the budget. Continuing with a complex, traditional hardware stack was no longer sustainable.
Beyond a Hypervisor Swap
James Marsack, Senior Network Engineer at RESA, was tasked with finding a long-term answer. A simple hypervisor swap would leave the storage and hardware problems in place, so the project became a complete reevaluation of RESA’s infrastructure strategy.
Cambridge Computer introduced Marsack to VergeOS. It kept the capabilities RESA relied on and extended them, consolidating infrastructure, simplifying management, reducing licensing costs and improving performance and resilience. RESA bought new, efficient hardware and used VergeOS to repurpose older equipment, drawing on the inexpensive commodity systems available in the secondary market and keeping spare parts on hand instead of paying for support renewals.
By timing its refresh carefully, RESA combined compute and storage into one orchestrated purchase. The consolidation reduced energy use, rack space, insurance, management overhead and cooling. The savings funded a stronger disaster recovery strategy, and with VergeOS the DR site became a complete, rapidly restorable environment able to run the entire data center far faster than a manual restore.
Old Storage Nodes, New Capabilities
For the proof of concept, RESA installed VergeOS directly on its existing SolidFire nodes. Hardware that had served only as storage became full compute and storage resources. The integrated VergeOS vSAN with Global Inline Deduplication achieved a 16:1 ratio on RESA’s data, compared with the 3.7:1 the team had seen on SolidFire.
Midway through testing, a significant hardware failure took several nodes offline. RESA was running ioGuardian, the self-healing data resilience engine built into VergeOS. It continuously monitors the environment and reconstructs missing or damaged data in real time when multiple nodes or drives fail, so recovery happens with no restore and no disruption. The failure was handled so smoothly that the team did not realize it had happened until they checked.
From Daily Backups to Hourly Snapshots
ioGuardian, combined with VergeOS hourly snapshots that run with no performance impact, let RESA retire its separate backup software, which almost doubled the project’s savings. Data protection improved at the same time. The team moved from one backup per day to hourly snapshots with instant rollback.
VergeOS snapshots come from ioClone, which works with VergeOS metadata tracking and Global Inline Deduplication. RESA can create and keep an unlimited number of snapshots without using extra physical storage for duplicate data. Each snapshot is independent of the production volume and of every other snapshot, so there are no snapshot chains to manage and every recovery point is fast and reliable.
RESA also retired its dedicated QNAP backup array, which had filled half a rack. A VergeOS backup and disaster recovery cluster replaced it in less space and can host virtual machines when needed.
A Smooth Move to Production
The proof of concept became the first phase of the production migration. The system was operational within 20 minutes of the initial deployment. The team used the built-in VergeOS ioMigrate tool to back up the VMs, removed the VMware tools and moved the workloads across. Along the way they placed VergeOS in its own dedicated firewall zone, which added a little time to the switchover and gave them the chance to tighten the county-wide VLAN architecture.
Performance and ROI
RESA’s older SolidFire hardware running VergeOS consistently outperformed its newer VMware infrastructure during the proof of concept. Production performance improved further after the move to newly acquired Supermicro-based nodes. More affordable, better-performing hardware and the retired backup software delivered a full return on investment in roughly two and a half years.
| Area | Before | After: VergeOS |
|---|---|---|
| Hypervisor | 14-node VMware environment | VergeOS |
| Compute | Cisco UCS, long lead times | Supermicro-based nodes and repurposed hardware |
| Storage | SolidFire, 1–2 nodes added per year | Integrated vSAN, add a node when needed |
| Deduplication | 3.7:1 | 16:1 |
| Backup frequency | Once a day | Every hour, instant rollback |
| Backup hardware | QNAP array, half a rack | VergeOS backup and DR cluster |
| Self-service | Limited by authentication constraints | 20 tenants with SSO and two-factor |
| Return on investment | Not applicable | About two and a half years |
Storage, supply chain and Broadcom started the project, and Marsack’s infrastructure-wide approach turned those pressures into savings far larger than a storage swap or hypervisor swap alone would have produced.
Secure Self-Service for Every Tenant
In the VMware environment, delegated access was difficult. Authentication constraints and complex permission mapping limited self-service, so the IT team handled even routine customer requests by hand. VergeOS multi-tenancy changed that. Marsack calls the tenant system “foolproof.” Integrated SSO and two-factor authentication make even edge environments with public-facing management interfaces far more secure, and each district or customer now manages its own virtual machines.
RESA supports 20 tenants and almost 600 virtual machines. Each entity has its own needs, schedules and workloads, and many require quick changes. Letting stakeholders manage their own environments frees RESA’s IT team to focus on strategic work.
Stable Operations and Responsive Support
Day to day, VergeOS has been stable and intuitive. Its Virtual Data Center architecture lets RESA segment environments by district and use case, which strengthens security and keeps oversight in place alongside self-service. Each technician can spin up isolated test environments inside a VDC, which has accelerated learning and experimentation. Marsack describes VergeIO support as “amazing,” and says he wishes all of his vendors delivered the support VergeIO provides every day.
AI and Simpler Scaling
RESA plans to keep consolidating its IT footprint. VergeOS removes the need to manage storage, compute and backup as separate layers. When the team needs capacity, it adds a node, with no architecture redesign and no SAN to relicense.
The team is also looking ahead to VergeIQ, the AI services layer built into VergeOS, which supports model inference, retrieval-augmented generation, virtual agents and pipeline automation on existing infrastructure. Ideas include an AI support agent trained on internal documentation to help users with the district’s legacy library system, and added context for the helpdesk ticketing knowledge base. RESA could build these on its own, and VergeIQ will make it faster and simpler.
Final Thoughts
The RESA team sees VergeOS as more than a VMware replacement. For them it is a different category of infrastructure, one that offers operational freedom, flexibility and simpler scaling.
“If you have the ability, go to VergeIO. You’ll have a menu of options that just don’t exist under VMware.”
James Marsack, Senior Network Engineer, St. Clair County RESA
See What VergeOS Does for Your Environment
RESA replaced its hypervisor, compute, storage and backup layers with one platform and paid for the project in about two and a half years. Talk with a VergeIO engineer about what that looks like for your sites.