George Crump

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Both dedicated storage arrays and vSAN are vulnerable to catastrophic failures, and using backups for storage failure recoveries may put your organization at risk. The problem is that many organizations rely solely on backups to recover from data loss, but what happens when your RAID system or entire storage infrastructure fails?

Traditional backup and disaster recovery strategies assume that storage remains operational. However, when faced with a multi-drive RAID failure or complete storage system failure, these assumptions fall apart, leaving IT scrambling for a way to restore critical applications.

The Multi-Drive RAID Failure Problem

RAID provides redundancy, but it is not immune to failure. If multiple drives fail in a RAID system, the array enters rebuild mode, which can take hours or even days, depending on the system and disk sizes. The greater the number of modern high-capacity drives used in today’s storage infrastructures is, the longer the rebuilds take. During this time, performance is severely degraded if the system remains online. In worst-case scenarios, additional failures during a rebuild can result in total data loss, requiring a full recovery from backups.

Recovering from a backup introduces another challenge: backup frequency. If backups only run once per night, the most recent recovery point may be nearly 24 hours old. That means a business day’s worth of transactions, work, and updates could be permanently lost. Even so-called instant recovery solutions provide only a temporary stopgap. These solutions run in an emulated mode on the backup storage appliance, which lacks the performance required to support production workloads. Once IT initiates recovery, data must be migrated back into production, which can only happen after the primary storage system is back online. If the failed RAID system takes days to rebuild, business operations remain at a standstill.

What Happens When an Entire Storage System Fails?

If the storage system fails due to controller failure, power supply issues, firmware corruption, or catastrophic hardware damage, the problem is significantly worse. With RAID failures, at least some storage remains intact. A total storage system failure means there is nowhere to restore the backup.

Even with a high-end storage vendor’s four-hour response time, that only guarantees a technician will arrive to diagnose the issue within four hours. The technician must still determine the failure, replace the necessary components, and return the system online. If new storage hardware is required, IT may need to procure and deploy new components, adding days or weeks to recovery time.

Traditional Recovery Strategies Are Insufficient

Using backups for storage failure, even with frequent backups, the backup interval limits the best-case recovery scenario. If the system only performs nightly backups, the most recent 24 hours of data are lost even after a complete restoration. Additionally, backups are designed for restoration and are not available continuously.

Bringing production storage back online still requires:

  • Provisioning and initializing new storage
  • Mounting and reformatting volumes
  • Transferring terabytes or petabytes of backup data back into production
  • Verifying data consistency and restoring application dependencies

Even backup solutions advertising “instant recovery” will not eliminate downtime. First, the data is still from last night’s backup, meaning any work completed throughout the day is lost. Second, “instant recovery” is not actually instant. The process still takes 30 minutes or more to complete, during which time workloads remain inaccessible.

Worse yet, most backup appliances are not designed for production workloads. These solutions run in an emulated state on the backup storage system, which lacks the performance characteristics needed to support live applications.

A critical factor often overlooked with instant recovery is migration back to production storage, which cannot occur until the primary production system is back online. If the storage system remains down or is undergoing lengthy repairs, the recovered environment remains trapped in the backup appliance, unable to transition to full production. This migration challenge significantly extends downtime and leaves IT with no viable path to restore normal operations until storage and production workloads are fully rebuilt.

VergeIO’s Inline Recovery with ioGuardian

using backups for storage failure

Instead of using backups for storage failure, VergeIO provides an inline repair capability built into the core of VergeOS, ioGuardian. Instead of relying on slow and complex backup restores, VergeOS frequently replicates to another, cost-effective storage instance, enabling instant inline recovery without requiring external backups.

Unlike RAID, which requires lengthy rebuilds and backup solutions that rely on outdated backups, VergeOS dynamically reallocates data blocks to workloads at the moment of failure, ensuring that applications remain operational. Even during multiple simultaneous drive or server failures, VergeIO can keep systems online—without waiting for RAID to rebuild or backup storage to be manually restored.

using backups for storage failure

This capability was demonstrated in our recent webinar comparing vSAN alternatives, where we successfully recovered from multiple concurrent drive failures in real time without performance degradation.

Rethinking Storage Resiliency

Using backups for storage failure is no longer the only, or even the best approach. Traditional backup and recovery models assume that storage will always be available to restore data; this includes instant recovery. That assumption no longer exists in modern IT environments, where storage failures can result in prolonged downtime. The only way to guarantee continuous operations is to integrate recovery directly into the vSAN and the hypervisor.

With VergeOS and ioGuardian, IT teams can confidently deploy commodity hardware without worrying that hardware failures—even multiple simultaneous failures—will impact production operations. This is how a VMware alternative like VergeOS can be more than just a VMware alternative—it delivers superior data resiliency that legacy hypervisors and storage systems simply cannot match.

Filed Under: Blog, Protection

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The move saves $150,000 annually and boosts IT efficiency

Ann Arbor, MI – February 18th, 2025 – Lancaster Central School District has successfully transitioned to VergeIO’s VergeOS, achieving $150,000 in annual cost savings while improving performance, data protection, and storage efficiency.

Prior to the transition, the district faced a substantial increase in licensing costs, creating budget concerns. Additionally, the previous solution fell short in storage efficiency, struggling with deduplication, snapshot performance, and resiliency. Lancaster’s IT team evaluated multiple virtualization solutions in search of a more cost-effective and high-performance alternative before selecting VergeIO’s integrated ultraconverged infrastructure platform.

“We needed a solution that wasn’t just a replacement for our existing virtualization platform, but an improvement. VergeIO delivered exactly that.”
– Eric Miller, Manager of Information Services, Lancaster Central School District

Challenges with Previous Virtualized SAN Solutions

Before transitioning, Lancaster encountered several issues with its previous virtualized SAN solution, including:

  • Rising capacity-based licensing costs, making budgeting unpredictable
  • Snapshot performance degradation, limiting recovery options
  • Inefficient deduplication, increasing storage requirements
  • Complex stretched cluster dependencies, leading to potential disruptions

Why Lancaster Chose VergeIO

After a thorough evaluation, VergeIO stood out as the preferred option due to its cost-effectiveness, storage integration, and ease of use. VergeIO directly integrates storage into the hypervisor, unlike other virtualization solutions, eliminating the need for external storage solutions.

Additional factors that influenced Lancaster’s decision included:

  • Superior support – VergeIO offers 100% US-based support with direct access to engineers
  • Inline global deduplication – VergeFS reduced storage consumption without performance penalties
  • Snapshot performance – VergeFS snapshots are instantaneous and impact-free, enabling more reliable backups and recovery
  • Resiliency improvements – Unlike Lancaster’s previous stretched clusters, VergeIO’s active-active deployment maintained uptime during ISP failures, ensuring seamless operations

“We wanted a system that did not require constant monitoring. VergeIO is so good at handling things behind the scenes that we can concentrate on improving and developing new solutions for our district leveraging the VergeIO platform.”
– Tim Johnson, Systems Administrator, Lancaster Central School District

Seamless Migration and Immediate Benefits

Lancaster deployed VergeIO in May 2024 as a proof of concept and completed its full transition to production workloads by November 2024. The move resulted in:

  • $150,000 in annual cost savings by eliminating substantial license fee increases
  • Simplified IT operations, allowing the team to focus on strategic projects
  • Improved storage efficiency with VergeFS’s global deduplication
  • Eliminated VMware’s performance bottlenecks, including snapshot and cluster dependency issues

“Lancaster Central School District’s move to VergeIO is a perfect example of how organizations can escape rising virtualization costs while improving operational efficiency. We look forward to supporting Lancaster’s journey and helping more organizations make the switch.”
– Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO

Comparing vSAN Alternatives: Free Expert Webinar

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

This webinar will provide an in-depth comparison of VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, helping IT teams make informed decisions on cost, performance, and data resiliency.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
📧 Register: No forms, just reply to this email with “Yes”

🔗 Learn More and Register

About Lancaster Central School District

Lancaster Central School District serves the Lancaster, NY community, providing innovative educational programs and advanced technology solutions to enhance student learning. The district’s commitment to technology modernization ensures a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure that supports students, educators, and administrators.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization and the leading VMware alternative. Unlike traditional hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) collapses the virtualization, storage, and networking stack into an integrated data center operating environment, VergeOS. Its efficiency enables greater workload density using existing hardware while improving data resiliency. The result is dramatically lower costs, improved availability, and simplified IT operations.

For more information, visit www.verge.io.

Media Contact

Judy Smith, JPR Communications
📧 [email protected]
📞 818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: , , ,

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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

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , , ,

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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.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , , ,

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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.

Filed Under: Protection

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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.

Filed Under: Storage