George Crump

Simplifying Public Sector DR

July 14, 2025 by George Crump

Simplifying Public Sector DR enables K-12 School Districts and Municipalities to reduce costs and deliver results. These organizations understand the importance of DR, but what many lack is a DR plan that is testable, fast, and affordable, given their constraints. That’s not a failure of planning—it’s a result of budget limitations, lean IT teams, and the high cost and complexity of traditional DR solutions.

Many school districts operate multiple campuses. Municipal governments manage buildings spread across city limits. Both have reliable connectivity. In both cases, there is physical infrastructure in place, but rarely the budget to dedicate one site solely to DR. Traditional DR strategies assume a dedicated site with identical hardware, duplicate software environments, and dedicated licensing. These DR solutions require time and staff availability to conduct failover testing. These assumptions don’t reflect the reality of public sector IT.

VergeOS helps bridge the gap between DR expectations and public sector constraints, simplifying Public Sector DR. Instead of requiring a dedicated second data center or additional backup infrastructure, it enables cross-replication between production environments and embeds DR directly into the core platform at no extra charge.

Simplify DR Without Extra Infrastructure

VergeOS is a unified platform that includes virtualization, storage, networking, AI, and data protection. It simplifies DR by eliminating the need for separate backup software, replication tools, or orchestration systems.

VergeOS’ ioClone technology drives snapshots, while real-time recovery is enabled through ioGuardian. ioGuardian continuously syncs deduplicated snapshots to another standalone VergeOS node or another cluster. That cluster can be housed in another server room, another municipal building, or even another school campus. If a hardware failure occurs, even multiple simultaneous failures, ioGuardian serves the required data inline, eliminating the need for formal restores or downtime.

There’s no need to provision standby hardware, rehydrate volumes, or manage failover scripts. Recovery happens within the same operational environment used daily.

During a proof of concept at St. Clair County RESA, multiple nodes failed during stress testing. The team experienced no downtime—ioGuardian handled the failure without interruption.

“ioGuardian was seamless. If it weren’t for the alerting system, we wouldn’t even have known there was a failure.”
— James Marsack, Senior Network Engineer, RESA

That recovery isn’t a secondary feature—it’s native to the VergeOS platform. For public sector IT, this turns DR from an isolated function into a core capability.

Simplify DR Testing

Register for our K-12 / Public Sector Panel Discussion

Simplifying Public Sector DR means addressing a major weakness of traditional DR implementations, the lack of routine testing. Testing requires time, staging infrastructure, and risk tolerance—resources that small IT teams managing day-to-day operations don’t have. When production consumes all available bandwidth, DR testing gets pushed aside. As a result, recovery plans remain unverified until something breaks.

VergeOS changes that. Every snapshot is an independent, bootable image with no dependency chains. These snapshots can be cloned instantly into test environments without impacting production.

Simplifying Public Sector DR with VergeOS’ Virtual Data Centers (VDC) delivers unprecedented DR confidence. VDCs are an isolated slice of infrastructure, each with its own compute, storage, and network boundaries. VDCs can be created for each campus in a K-12 use case or each department in a municipality use case. Once created, entire VDCs can be snapshotted to create realistic testing zones that behave like production but are contained and safe to experiment in.

With VDC snapshots, disaster recovery testing becomes part of standard operations. IT teams can simulate failures, validate recovery workflows, and rehearse failover processes without service disruption. This level of confidence is impossible with legacy backup tools or external orchestration layers.

VDCs solve the patching problem. Updates can be applied and validated in a cloned VDC before touching production. If something breaks, the production VDC and other VDCs are unaffected. This removes the need for risky maintenance windows and eliminates reliance on rollback plans. Patch management becomes a controlled, repeatable task.

VergeOS enables small public sector IT teams to test recovery plans, validate infrastructure changes, and apply updates without sacrificing uptime or diverting staff from their primary responsibilities. In this on-demand webinar, we demonstrate how to execute a complete disaster recovery in a few mouse clicks.

No More Hardware-Heavy DR Plans

DR strategies assume the need for a dedicated DR site with near-identical infrastructure. That’s not feasible for school districts or local governments with fixed funding and long procurement cycles. VergeOS allows IT teams to build DR clusters using retired servers or repurposed hardware.

Because VergeOS supports heterogeneous clusters, you can mix and match older and newer hardware. Global deduplication reduces the amount of data that needs to traverse the WAN, lowering bandwidth requirements and minimizing the required capacity at the DR target. And with flat-rate, per-server licensing, there are no penalties for maintaining standby capacity.

Simplify DR with Cross-Replicating Production Sites

School districts and public sector organizations can leverage their need for production servers in each of their multiple buildings or campuses by implementing cross-replication, rather than maintaining a separate, dedicated disaster recovery site. With VergeOS’ support for heterogeneous clusters, recovery environments don’t need to match production hardware.

In these designs, Site A protects Site B, and Site B protects Site A, using infrastructure that currently supports live services. This eliminates the need for idle hardware and allows both environments to remain active, monitored, and continuously validated.

Global deduplication plays a key role in making this model efficient. Only unique data between the two sites is replicated, minimizing bandwidth consumption and storage requirements at the remote end. This not only improves performance but reduces the cost of maintaining a resilient, multi-site architecture.

VergeOS is resilient even if there is a network outage between two connected sites. During a prolonged network outage between their two production sites, Lancaster Central School District saw VergeOS resilience in action.

“We lost communication between sites for an extended period. With our old VMware-based architecture, both sites would have gone down for the duration. But with VergeOS, everything kept running. Each site remained operational on its own, and once connectivity was restored, they resynchronized automatically—no manual intervention needed.”
— Tim Johnson, Senior Systems Administrator, Lancaster Central School District

This automated, platform-level recovery is critical for teams that don’t have the time or resources to re-sync systems or troubleshoot replication failures under pressure manually.

Final Word

K–12 school districts and municipal IT departments face the same threats as any enterprise—hardware failure, ransomware, service outages—but without the same level of funding or staffing. A dedicated site, duplicate hardware, and third-party orchestration tools are often out of reach. VergeOS makes simplifying Public Sector DR achievable by leveraging the infrastructure you already have, embedding resilience into the platform, and removing the need for separate tools. It meets all the Public Sector requirements for DR.

Whether you’re preparing to exit VMware or simply trying to build a sustainable DR strategy, VergeOS offers a path that aligns with public sector realities, without compromise.

Learn more about how VergeOS can help K-12 and Public Sector modernize infrastructure.

Cut Education Infrastructure Costs

July 8, 2025 by George Crump

The decision to leave VMware often stems from necessity, but it is also an opportune time to take a broader view and cut education infrastructure costs. However, it is not just K-12 that is under pressure; the entire public sector is feeling the burden of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Licensing costs are rising, support terms are evolving, and legacy renewal paths are no longer aligned with operational realities. IT planners should view this as more than a hypervisor replacement task. It’s an opportunity to reduce overall infrastructure costs and eliminate long-standing inefficiencies across the entire stack.

The Challenge of Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting

School districts and municipalities operate in environments where budgets are fixed and procurement is slow. Yet their infrastructure is built on a layered model that multiplies complexity. Virtualization, storage, networking, backup, and disaster recovery are delivered by different vendors, each with its own licensing models and hardware dependencies.

This model made sense when departments had specialists and budgets could accommodate capital refresh cycles. Today, it’s a liability. Managing multiple systems means more support contracts, more staff overhead, and higher long-term costs.

VergeOS: One Platform, All Functions

The public sector’s IT infrastructure needs to be reliable and manageable without requiring a team of specialists to maintain it. VergeOS consolidates the entire stack—virtualization, storage, networking, backup, and DR—into one code base, a unified data center operating system. It installs directly on commodity x86 hardware and can run on both existing servers and new systems.

This consolidation reduces the number of systems to learn, maintain, and budget for. Instead of managing multiple vendors and renewal cycles, IT teams can focus on delivering services. VergeOS doesn’t replace one product—it replaces an entire category of legacy infrastructure.

“VergeIO is so good at handling things behind the scenes that we can focus on new solutions.”
— Tim Johnson, Senior Systems Administrator, Lancaster Central School District

Flat Licensing Means Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting

Budget predictability is critical for schools and municipalities that rely on public funding and multi-year planning cycles. Legacy vendors price by core, feature, or consumption, making it difficult to forecast costs and avoid surprise overages.

VergeOS employs a flat, per-server licensing model that includes all features. There are no add-ons, capacity gates, or audit traps. This structure enables precise long-term planning and avoids the cost escalations that follow infrastructure growth or vendor consolidation events.

“Lancaster CSD cut $150,000/year in licensing and maintenance costs.”— Lancaster Central School District

Storage Efficiency for Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting

Production performance is a non-negotiable requirement for public sector IT. Applications such as student information systems, GIS tools, payroll systems, and financial databases must remain responsive even as infrastructure budgets are tightened. Traditional storage systems force a tradeoff between performance and efficiency. Deduplication features are licensed separately, offloaded to backup tiers, or implemented in ways that degrade real-time I/O performance. vSAN environments, in particular, struggle under snapshot load and high-concurrency access.

VergeFS, the file system built into VergeOS, is designed for production performance. It performs inline global deduplication across all volumes and snapshots without throttling throughput or introducing latency. Deduplication occurs in real-time, and because it integrates into VergeOS—not as a background task or secondary service—it improves cache efficiency and network performance.

“We utilize global dedupe and compression—VergeOS VSAN is giving us a 16:1 ratio. SolidFire iSCSI was 3.7:1.”
— James Marsack, RESA

Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting Requires Integrated Data Protection

IT can also cut education infrastructure costs by eliminating the need for separate backup hardware and software. In VergeOS, snapshots are fully independent, deduplicated, and performance-neutral. They can be used aggressively for protection and rollback without affecting user experience or workload performance. For districts and municipalities, this means increased protection, reduced hardware requirements, and lower risk, without compromising speed.

Lancaster Central School District experienced this first-hand when moving from a VMware vSAN environment to VergeOS. They had previously avoided using snapshots because of performance degradation.

“We can take snapshots of VMs without worrying about performance hits. That alone is a huge win.”
— Tim Johnson, Senior Systems Administrator, Lancaster CSD

Embedded Data Availability and DR Enables Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting

Backup infrastructure has evolved into one of the most expensive components of the IT stack. It’s common for districts to pay nearly as much for backup software and hardware as they do for their hypervisor layer. Recovery is slow, operations are manual, and storage costs constrain retention policies.

VergeOS eliminates the need for a separate backup infrastructure. Snapshots are built in and handled by ioClone. Recovery is managed by ioGuardian, which delivers missing data inline during failures, eliminating the need for restore jobs or downtime. This architecture provides fast recovery and strong resiliency without requiring backup servers, appliances, or job management.

“ioGuardian was seamless. If it weren’t for the alerting system, we wouldn’t even have known there was a failure.”
— James Marsack, St. Clair County RESA

Predictable Infrastructure Budgeting Requires Long-Term Sustainability

The public sector’s IT infrastructure doesn’t just need to survive the current budget cycle—it needs to be sustainable and scalable. IT can cut education infrastructure costs by slowing the rate of server refresh cycles, minimizing software bloat, and lowering the total number of platforms IT teams must support.

VergeOS supports heterogeneous clusters, so older hardware can remain useful and coexist with new servers. Its unified architecture removes the need for dedicated backup or DR tools. With a consistent interface and a single software base, VergeOS reduces the learning curve and support overhead that drains time and staffing resources.

“We extended the life of our existing hardware while reducing licensing costs.”
— Brian Bazzell, IT Director, City of Saint Peters

Preparing for an AI Future

As AI continues to evolve, public sector organizations are under pressure to support new initiatives—from AI literacy in K–12 classrooms to virtual assistants that improve citizen services. However, legacy infrastructure is not designed to support the data access patterns, GPU dependencies, or orchestration complexity required by AI workloads. For IT teams already stretched thin, layering AI frameworks on top of traditional infrastructure increases cost and complexity.

VergeOS was built to support modern workloads alongside traditional applications. With VergeIQ, VergeOS introduces an integrated AI services layer that enables school districts and municipalities to experiment with AI without requiring a separate infrastructure stack. VergeIQ supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), inference pipelines, virtual agents, and model serving directly within the VergeOS platform. There is no need for Kubernetes or external orchestration tools—customers use the same management interface and infrastructure they use today.

GPU pass-through and pooling are supported natively, enabling AI workloads to run securely and efficiently without sacrificing visibility or manageability. Whether you’re building an internal chatbot for staff support or training students on localized language models, VergeIQ makes it possible to begin deploying AI with minimal friction.

St. Clair County RESA is planning to train AI-powered support agents on their documentation to assist district users. VergeOS positions public sector IT teams not just to handle today’s challenges but to support tomorrow’s opportunities without another round of tools, training, or vendors.

The VergeIO View

Leaving VMware is a necessary step, but it’s not the whole solution. The opportunity is bigger: reduce costs, simplify infrastructure, and build an environment that public sector IT can afford to manage, year after year, upgrade after upgrade. VergeOS solves the infrastructure modernization problem by offering a practical, technically sound path forward—and it does so with fewer moving parts.

Next Steps

Request a technical demo of VergeOS.
Schedule a whiteboard architecture session with a VergeIO architect
Explore case studies from other public sector deployments.
Read our white paper “How K–12 School Districts and Municipalities Use VergeOS to Solve IT Challenges.”

St. Clair County RESA Modernizes Infrastructure with VergeIO, Eliminates VMware and Veeam

July 8, 2025 by George Crump

For Immediate Release

Ann Arbor, MI – July 8th, 2025 – St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA), which provides centralized IT services for five school districts, a local community college, and seven municipalities in Michigan, has successfully modernized its infrastructure by replacing VMware and Veeam with VergeIO’s software-defined infrastructure platform, VergeOS.

Faced with mounting costs, hardware limitations, and industry disruptions, RESA initiated a complete reevaluation of its IT environment. “We were hit with a one-two-three punch,” said James Marsack, Senior Network Engineer at RESA. “First, NetApp announced the end-of-life for our SolidFire array. Then Broadcom acquired VMware and froze all updates while raising prices. Finally, our Cisco UCS environment brought supply chain delays and massive hardware maintenance costs. We needed more than a patch—we needed an infrastructure rethink.”

RESA found its answer in VergeOS, a single software platform that combines virtualization, storage, and networking with built-in backup and disaster recovery. Introduced to VergeIO through Cambridge Computer, Marsack said, “VergeOS didn’t just preserve what we relied on—it expanded it. It allowed us to simplify management, reduce licensing costs, and improve performance. And it just works.”

Key Results:

High-Efficiency Storage: VergeOS’ VSAN with global inline deduplication achieved a 16:1 efficiency ratio, compared to 3.7:1 with SolidFire.
Backup and DR Simplified: Replaced a half-rack QNAP array and Veeam with VergeOS’ integrated snapshot and replication system.
Hourly Snapshots: Eliminated daily backup windows and increased resiliency with hourly, space-efficient snapshots and transparent recovery via ioGuardian.
Secure Self-Service: VergeOS’ secure, multi-tenant architecture empowered districts and municipalities with self-service capabilities, dramatically lowering operational overhead.

“Veeam jobs failed regularly. With VergeOS, we get hourly snapshots, instant rollback, and reliable replication—no third-party dependencies,” said Marsack.

RESA also improved security and control. “VergeOS’ tenanting system is elegant—brilliant, even. With SSO and two-factor authentication, it’s vastly more secure than VMware,” Marsack added. “Now, our customers can manage their own VMs, which reduces our management burden and increases their satisfaction.”

Marsack credited Cambridge Computer for facilitating the transformation. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it wasn’t for Cambridge. They introduced us to VergeIO, and it changed everything.”

Click here to read the in-depth Case Study about St. Clair RESA’s journey to VergeOS.

VergeIO will be hosting a webinar on July 17th at 1:00 PM ET, featuring RESA. Click here to register.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative, providing a unified data center operating system that converges virtualization, storage, networking, and backup into a single piece of software. VergeOS simplifies IT operations, reduces costs, and enables rapid infrastructure deployment on new or repurposed hardware. For more information, visit www.verge.io.

About St. Clair County RESA

St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA) is one of Michigan’s 56 intermediate school districts. It provides centralized IT, administrative, and instructional services to five local K-12 school districts, a community college, and multiple municipal entities across the region. RESA’s mission is to deliver cost-effective, high-quality solutions that empower its educational and civic partners to serve their communities more effectively.

Media Contact:
Judy Smith
JPR for VergeIO
[email protected]
(818) 522-9673

Backup Independence

June 30, 2025 by George Crump

While you are looking to break away from high VMware licensing fees, why not declare your backup independence? For decades, enterprise data protection strategies have relied on a layered architecture, where production workloads run on a hypervisor, are protected by third-party backup software, and are optionally replicated to a secondary site. This architecture, while functional, introduces unnecessary complexity, high operational overhead, and escalating backup licensing costs.

VergeOS presents an alternative approach. It is a hypervisor replacement for platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix, integrating native data protection capabilities that eliminate the need for separate backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure. For organizations transitioning to a virtualization alternative, VergeOS provides an opportunity to modernize their entire data protection stack. The result doubles your return on investment while increasing your availability and resiliency.

This article outlines how VergeOS, through its integrated technologies—ioClone, ioGuardian, ioReplicate, and Virtual Data Centers (VDCs)—provides an architectural foundation that can, in many cases, supplant conventional backup software, allowing you to declare your backup independence.

Integrated Data Protection via ioClone Snapshots

Traditional backup workflows rely on scheduled jobs to create point-in-time copies of data, at significant performance and storage cost. VergeOS eliminates the need for this workflow through ioClone, its native snapshot mechanism. Independent, unlimited snapshots are the foundation of backup independence.

ioClone snapshots are:

These characteristics enable backup independence with snapshots taken at high frequency and retained over long periods without degrading performance or consuming excessive storage.

With ioClone-powered snapshots, customers can restore individual files, entire virtual machines, or complete virtual data centers directly from ioClone snapshots, dramatically simplifying recovery workflows.

Please register for our hands-on lab to explore snapshot creation, rollback, and recovery operations in a live VergeOS environment.

Integrated Data Availability via ioGuardian

While ioClone addresses point-in-time recovery, ioGuardian introduces a different dimension: fault tolerance through a regularly updated third copy of production data, taking backup independence to a new level.

Backup Independence requires real-time recovery

Each time an ioClone snapshot is taken, ioGuardian synchronizes a copy of the underlying data structures into a reserved, isolated hardware domain outside the primary instance of VergeOS. In the event of a severe infrastructure-level failure—such as the simultaneous failure of multiple drives or nodes—VergeOS can dynamically reference this ioGuardian copy to access the blocks of data that the affected virtual data centers or virtual machines require to remain operational. It is data protection that goes beyond even a three-way mirror.

This capability is not merely for recovery—it is designed to prevent disruption. Where RAID and mirrored data stores might fail under dual-disk or multi-node failure conditions, VergeOS with ioGuardian continues to serve the environment in real time by reconstructing missing data from the third copy.

Key distinctions include:

Granular Access: ioGuardian enables block-level access to data, allowing for precise and efficient recovery.
Continuous Update Model: It is not a passive backup but a frequently updated replica, aligned with the latest ioClone snapshot.
Beyond Mirroring: ioGuardian introduces a level of redundancy that extends beyond conventional two- and three-way mirrors, offering an additional layer of protection when traditional methods would fail.

Integrated Data Replication via ioReplicate

Backup Independence built-in data replication and off-site recovery

Backup independence mandates off-site retention and disaster recovery. VergeOS includes ioReplicate, a native VM- and VDC-level replication engine. Organizations can define policies to replicate workloads to another VergeOS instance, whether on-premises or geographically remote.

ioReplicate Delivers:

Scheduled or Real-Time Replication: Configurable to meet varied RPO/RTO requirements.
Bandwidth Management: Integrated controls allow replication traffic to be rate-limited or scheduled during non-peak hours.
Application-Consistent Snapshots: With proper guest configuration, VergeOS can generate consistent snapshots for replicated workloads.

Unlike traditional DR workflows, which often involve external replication appliances or orchestration software, VergeOS performs these operations within a single, integrated platform, reducing points of failure and operational complexity.

Virtual Data Centers for Logical Isolation and DR Testing

Further solidifying backup independence are Virtual Data Centers (VDCs), a powerful feature in VergeOS. VDCs offer logical segmentation of compute, storage, and networking resources within a single VergeOS environment.

Use cases include:

DR Simulation: Replicated VDCs can be brought online for non-disruptive recovery testing.
Sandboxing: Snapshots of production VDCs can be cloned into isolated test environments for development or security analysis.
Regulatory Compliance: Logical boundaries help support data sovereignty and multi-tenant isolation requirements.
Limiting Ransomware Exposure: If ransomware infiltrates your environment, VDCs mitigate its impact. It can’t spread to other VDCs. Then you can use our ioFortify capabilities to identify and rapidly recover from the attack.

Backup Independence requires built in ransomware detection and recovery

The VDC capability simplifies DR planning, allowing organizations to mirror, test, and failover entire segments of their infrastructure without duplicating physical resources or integrating external orchestration frameworks.

For these cases, VergeOS supports both agentless and agent-based backup strategies and can coexist with other products.

A New Interpretation of 3-2-1

VergeOS supports a modernized interpretation of the classic 3-2-1 rule for data protection:

3 copies: Primary production VM, multiple ioClone read-only snapshots and ioGuardian third-copy layer on-premises.
2 locations: Primary site and remote VergeOS instance via ioReplicate plus remote ioGuardian copy.
1 platform: All functions—virtualization, data protection, and DR—managed within a single codebase, VergeOS.

VergeOS eliminates the need for:

External backup agents and proxies
Snapshot-to-backup translation layers
Separate orchestration or DR automation products
Separate backup licensing and storage costs

The result is a simplified and backup-independent alternative to VMware.

Evaluating the Claim

Skeptics are right to challenge assertions of backup independence, but replacing, or at least reducing dependency on backup is a common theme in our customer case studies. Organizations replacing VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix should not default to replicating their legacy backup environments. Instead, they should evaluate how a platform like VergeOS redefines the boundary between production and protection.

To Learn More

If your organization is planning an infrastructure refresh—whether driven by changes to virtualization platforms, disaster recovery requirements, or a desire to declare backup independence—VergeOS offers a unified, forward-looking solution.

Schedule a session with one of our data protection experts to evaluate your current architecture and explore how VergeOS can support a seamless VMware exit while redefining the boundary between production and protection. In many cases, it may also enable you to eliminate your dependency on legacy backup software.

The Infrastructure Problem

June 27, 2025 by George Crump

VMware’s pricing changes, cloud cost overruns, or the AI skills shortage are symptoms of the infrastructure problem: legacy environments that demand new layers of complexity with every new initiative. Each shift in strategy—whether it’s migrating to the cloud, deploying AI workloads, or navigating vendor transitions—exposes just how fragile and fragmented traditional architectures have become. IT teams are forced to bolt on new platforms, hire niche expertise, or overprovision resources just to keep up. The result isn’t innovation—it’s operational drag. It’s time to rethink infrastructure from the ground up.

Watch our on-demand industry briefing with ESG to learn the impact of these challenges and how to solve them

According to recent (May 2025) ESG research titled “Private AI, Virtualization, and Cloud: Transforming the Future of Infrastructure Modernization,” a survey of 380 mid-sized to large data centers, organizations everywhere are scrambling to address these top challenges:

VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom has created uncertainty for the 80% of enterprises relying on their virtualization platform.
Simultaneously, 75% of organizations are rethinking their cloud strategies as costs spiral beyond projections.
And 53% of organizations plan to deploy private, on-premises AI infrastructure within the next two years, but 70% struggle to find qualified staff to manage increasingly complex infrastructure environments.

IT leaders are approaching these as separate crises requiring individual solutions. But what if there’s a single root cause driving all these problems?

The Symptoms of the Infrastructure Problem

The evidence of the infrastructure problem is everywhere:

VMware’s disruption has left organizations hunting for hypervisor alternatives, only to discover that most options require new skill sets and architectural approaches.
Cloud repatriation is accelerating as the economics of long-term workloads in public cloud environments prove unsustainable—what promised operational flexibility has become a financial burden.
AI adoption is stalling because implementing on-premises AI is a must-have to mine proprietary data, but vendors are suggesting it requires building separate infrastructure stacks with specialized hardware, networking, and storage.
Talent acquisition has become nearly impossible as the complexity of managing modern infrastructure outpaces the available skill pool.

These issues dominate IT planning discussions, budget meetings, and strategic reviews. However, focusing on symptoms instead of causes leads to fragmented solutions that exacerbate the underlying problem.

Software is the Source of the Infrastructure Problem

The source of the infrastructure problem isn’t any single vendor, technology, or market force. It’s the acceptance of fundamentally flawed infrastructure software that forces fragmentation by design.

For over two decades, the industry has normalized building data centers by assembling disconnected components—hypervisors that require separate storage systems, networking hardware that needs additional security appliances, backup solutions that demand their own management consoles, and now AI platforms that require new and again isolated stacks.

This fragmented approach creates four compounding problems:

Hardware Vendor Lock-In: Traditional infrastructure software ties organizations to proprietary hardware ecosystems. Storage controllers costing 10X what they should, certified network switches, rigid hardware compatibility lists—all designed to extract maximum revenue rather than deliver maximum value.

Operational Silos: Every new initiative spawns its own infrastructure requirements. Virtualization teams, storage specialists, network engineers, backup administrators, and now AI infrastructure experts—each managing separate tools, consoles, and technologies that barely communicate with each other.

The Add-On Trap: Poor infrastructure software creates gaps that must be filled with additional vendor solutions. What starts as “adding backup capabilities” becomes an ecosystem of interconnected products, each requiring its own licensing, hardware, support contracts, and specialized expertise.

Complexity Explosion: The staffing crisis isn’t just about finding qualified people—it’s about the exponential complexity created when organizations need specialists for every infrastructure domain, plus the integration expertise to make them work together.

How to Solve the Infrastructure Problem

Solving the infrastructure problem becomes possible when infrastructure software is designed correctly from the ground up. VergeOS demonstrates this approach by integrating virtualization, storage, networking, and AI capabilities into a single codebase, creating a unified platform.

Instead of assembling separate components, organizations get unified functionality that eliminates vendor lock-in, operational silos, add-on complexity, and excessive staffing requirements while leveraging existing hardware. A single platform addresses what organizations currently treat as separate problems: VMware alternatives, cloud cost optimization, AI infrastructure deployment, and skills shortage mitigation.

This isn’t theoretical—it’s happening today. Read our case studies to learn how organizations using VergeOS report reducing infrastructure costs, in some cases, by over 90%, eliminating multiple vendor relationships, and enabling single administrators to manage entire infrastructure stacks that previously required specialized teams.

The Path Forward

The infrastructure challenges consuming your planning cycles aren’t inevitable. They’re the predictable result of accepting software that forces fragmentation rather than enabling consolidation.

VMware disruption, cloud cost overruns, AI deployment complexity, and skills shortages are symptoms of a deeper architectural problem. Addressing symptoms individually—such as finding new hypervisors, optimizing cloud spend, building AI infrastructure, and hiring more specialists—treats the effects while leaving the cause untouched.

The solution requires recognizing that modern infrastructure demands modern architecture. Software that natively integrates all infrastructure functions. Platforms that work with commodity hardware rather than forcing proprietary purchases. Systems that simplify rather than complicate operations.

Organizations that recognize this shift now will gain significant advantages over those that focus on treating symptoms instead of addressing the underlying problem.

To learn more, download our white paper, “Four Forces Accelerating Infrastructure Modernization.”

VergeIO-Backed ESG Research Reveals Four Forces Driving Urgent Infrastructure Modernization

June 17, 2025 by George Crump

ANN ARBOR, MI — June 17, 2025 — New research sponsored by VergeIO and conducted by Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), titled Private AI, Virtualization, and Cloud: Transforming the Future of Infrastructure Modernization, reveals a dramatic shift in how organizations approach IT infrastructure strategy. The study, which surveyed 380 midmarket and enterprise IT professionals across North America, identified four primary forces accelerating the need for infrastructure modernization: virtualization market disruption, rising cloud costs, the operational impact of AI, and a persistent shortage of skilled IT personnel.

According to ESG, 54% of organizations are actively investigating or planning to replace their primary hypervisor, a significant figure given VMware’s historically dominant market share. The study also shows that 76% of organizations are re-evaluating their cloud strategies in response to cost pressures, and more than 60% are actively scaling their infrastructure to support on-premises AI initiatives.

“These four pressures are converging at a time when IT teams are already stretched thin,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at ESG. “What organizations need now is not just a cloud-like experience or an alternative to legacy vendors—they need simplicity, predictability, and architectural leverage. Solutions like VergeOS are designed to deliver exactly that.”

The findings align with VergeIO’s latest white paper, Four Forces Accelerating Infrastructure Modernization, which explores how organizations are compressing their IT planning horizons in response to these external pressures. The paper positions VergeOS as a unified software-defined platform capable of replacing legacy virtualization stacks, reducing complexity, and enabling both traditional and AI workloads within the same environment.

“Most organizations don’t have the luxury of rebuilding from scratch, and they can’t afford to wait,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “VergeOS was designed to meet this moment. It eliminates silos, simplifies operations, and restores control—without forcing customers into disruptive re-platforming.”

VergeIO was one of the sponsors of the ESG research, which is available now exclusively from VergeIO to industry leaders exploring modernization options. The company will be hosting a webinar on June 26th at 1:00 PM ET, featuring Scott Sinclair and George Crump in a live discussion on the future of data center infrastructure. Register here:

Live Webinar: The Four Forces Accelerating Infrastructure Modernization

About VergeIO
VergeIO is the leader in ultra-converged infrastructure, delivering a unified software platform—VergeOS—that replaces traditional virtualization, storage, and networking layers with a single data center operating system. VergeOS is the leading VMware alternative, offering a flat, software-defined architecture that simplifies IT operations while improving scalability and control. From core to edge to private AI environments, VergeOS simplifies infrastructure and accelerates innovation.

About ESG
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a division of TechTarget, is a leading industry analyst and research firm that delivers actionable market intelligence and custom research for the enterprise technology sector.

Media Contact
Judy Smith
JPR for VergeIO
[email protected]

818-522-9673