George Crump

by

Revolutionizing Disaster Recovery at a Lower Cost

For Immediate Press Release

Ann Arbor, MI – [December 3rd, 2024] – VergeIO, a leading provider of ultraconverged infrastructure solutions, has announced the launch of ioReplicate, an innovative disaster recovery (DR) solution seamlessly integrated into its flagship VergeOS platform. Designed to eliminate complexity and reduce costs, ioReplicate delivers reliable, infrastructure-wide recovery that ensures organizations can recover from disasters quickly and confidently—in just three mouse clicks.

A recent VergeIO survey revealed that more than 50% of IT professionals are not confident in their ability to recover from a disaster in less than 24 hours. Compounding this issue, over 90% of respondents reported relying on backup systems as their primary DR strategy due to the high cost of alternative solutions. However, backup systems are often too fragmented and slow to meet the needs of modern businesses, creating significant recovery risks. VergeIO’s ioReplicate addresses this challenge by integrating DR capabilities directly into VergeOS and leveraging the platform’s ability to mix hardware types, dramatically lowering the cost of disaster recovery solutions.

“Traditional disaster recovery solutions are either prohibitively expensive or too slow to ensure reliable recovery,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “With ioReplicate, we’ve designed a solution that eliminates these barriers, offering a cost-effective, integrated DR solution that’s simple to deploy and highly reliable.”

Key Features of ioReplicate:

  • Integrated DR with Virtual Data Centers (VDCs): ioReplicate encapsulates entire workloads, including virtual machine configurations and networking settings, into portable Virtual Data Centers (VDCs). These VDCs can be seamlessly replicated across VergeOS instances or to third-party providers, enabling complete recovery in any environment.
  • Flexible, Cost-Effective Infrastructure: VergeOS’s ability to mix and match hardware types reduces disaster recovery costs by allowing organizations to use cost-efficient hardware at their DR sites.
  • Efficient Data Replication: ioReplicate leverages VergeOS’s global deduplication and ioClone snapshots to ensure WAN-optimized replication with minimal bandwidth usage. Replication frequency is configurable, supporting near real-time updates to meet strict recovery point objectives (RPOs).
  • Advanced Software-Defined Networking: ioReplicate includes VergeFabric, which virtualizes networking capabilities such as firewalls, routing, and micro-segmentation. Its dynamic routing protocol, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), ensures seamless traffic redirection to the DR site during outages, without requiring third-party failover tools.

Addressing IT Professionals’ Disaster Recovery Challenges

ioReplicate’s integration into VergeOS directly addresses the challenges highlighted in VergeIO’s recent survey. By combining advanced DR capabilities with cost-efficient infrastructure, ioReplicate eliminates the high price tags associated with traditional solutions and reduces dependence on backup systems.

“Our customers don’t have to choose between cost and reliability,” said Jason Yaeger, SVP of Engineering at VergeIO. “ioReplicate provides a solution that is affordable, powerful, and easy to use, allowing businesses to recover confidently and cost-effectively.”

Availability

ioReplicate is available immediately as part of the VergeOS platform. For more information or to schedule a demo, visit www.verge.io.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization. VergeIO simplifies IT operations and delivers cost-efficient, scalable, and high-performance IT environments by integrating virtualization, storage, and networking into a single unified platform. VergeOS enables organizations to reduce costs, streamline operations, and focus on innovation. For more information, visit www.verge.io.

Press Contact:

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

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With:

by

Disaster recovery (DR) is critical for safeguarding business operations. Overcoming the high cost of DR solutions is a top priority for all organizations so they can expand the scope of their protection. Conventional approaches require significant investments in duplicate hardware, third-party tools, and intricate processes, forcing businesses to either overspend or accept inadequate recovery capabilities.

overcoming the high cost of DR

VergeIO’s ioReplicate, seamlessly integrated into VergeOS, offers an innovative and cost-effective alternative. By providing a cost-effective, infrastructure-wide solution, ioReplicate simplifies disaster recovery while ensuring reliability. It not only allows organizations to move beyond VMware’s costly licensing model but also addresses one of IT’s most pressing challenges—achieving fast, dependable recovery in the face of disaster.

Why Is Disaster Recovery So Expensive?

The cost of disaster recovery is driven by several factors:

1. Duplicate Infrastructure Requirements

Traditional DR often requires maintaining identical hardware at the disaster recovery site to ensure compatibility and performance. This duplication doubles the cost of infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking equipment, making DR prohibitively expensive for many organizations. Overcoming the high cost of DR, requires the ability to use dissimilar and less expensive hardware at the DR site.

2. Fragmented Tools and Processes

Most DR strategies rely on multiple third-party tools for backup, replication, failover, and networking. Integrating these disparate tools requires significant time, expertise, and ongoing maintenance, all of which add to the overall cost.

3. Bandwidth and Data Transfer Costs

Inefficient replication techniques often force organizations to overpay for data transfer capacity. Overcoming the high cost of DR requires global deduplication for efficient bandwidth utilization, especially when sending multiple production sites to a single DR site.

4. Testing and Validation Challenges

Testing a DR plan is essential, but traditional approaches make it difficult and costly to create realistic test environments. Many organizations skip or reduce testing, which increases the risk of failure when a real disaster strikes.

VMware: A Perfect Example of the high cost of DR

VMware environments exemplify the challenges of traditional disaster recovery. VMware’s fragmented approach to DR forces customers to piece together solutions using tools from multiple vendors. For example, businesses must often rely on third-party tools for data replication, backup, failover automation, and network reconfiguration, leading to higher costs and complexity.

Register for our Live ioReplicate Webinar and Demo

Moreover, VMware’s fragmented approach creates inefficiencies in disaster recovery response times. Without tight integration between components, IT teams face delays in ensuring data synchronization, reconfiguring infrastructure, and restoring systems during a disaster.

As VMware’s licensing strategies have shifted, many customers are seeking alternatives to address cost concerns. However, this is also an opportunity for organizations to evaluate how a VMware alternative could significantly improve their disaster recovery capabilities. A solution like VergeOS not only reduces costs but also enhances DR response times with integrated features that eliminate the need for third-party tools and complex configurations.

Does Backup Software Overcome The High Cost of DR?

Because of VMware’s disjointed approach to DR and the high costs of traditional solutions, many organizations have no choice but to rely on backup software as their disaster recovery solution. While this approach reduces costs, it introduces significant challenges that can undermine the effectiveness of recovery efforts.

1. Infrequent Data Capture

Backup solutions typically capture data once per day. This infrequency creates gaps in data protection, leaving hours—or even an entire day—of critical information at risk. For organizations with high transaction volumes, the potential for data loss is unacceptable.

2. Slow Recovery Speeds

Recovering from backups is a time-consuming process. IT teams must locate the correct backup, restore data to new or existing systems, and reconfigure infrastructure to bring operations back online. This process often takes hours or days, resulting in prolonged downtime and lost revenue.

3. Limited Testing Capabilities

Backup systems are not designed for comprehensive disaster recovery testing. Simulating real-world disaster scenarios is difficult, making it harder to validate recovery plans and increasing the likelihood of failure during an actual event.

While backup solutions may offer an economical starting point, their limitations can leave organizations unprepared for real-world disaster scenarios.

VergeOS and ioReplicate: The Perfect Balance

overcoming the high cost of DR

VergeOS with ioReplicate provides the ideal solution for organizations looking to balance cost and performance in their disaster recovery strategy. By integrating advanced DR capabilities into a single platform, VergeIO delivers the speed and efficiency of purpose-built DR tools at a cost lower than traditional backup solutions.

Overcoming the High Cost of DR with ioReplicate

1. Cost-Effective Infrastructure

ioReplicate eliminates the need for identical duplicate hardware by allowing organizations to mix and match commodity servers, existing infrastructure, or even use bare-metal cloud service providers. This flexibility significantly reduces infrastructure costs without compromising performance.

2. Unified DR Tools

All disaster recovery functions—replication, failover, and networking—are built into VergeOS, removing the need for expensive third-party tools and simplifying the DR process.

3. Efficient Data Replication

Using global inline deduplication and ioClone snapshots, ioReplicate minimizes data transfer, reducing bandwidth usage and costs while supporting frequent, near real-time replication to meet stringent RPOs.

4. Simplified Testing and Validation

ioReplicate leverages Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) to simplify DR testing. IT teams can create snapshots of entire workloads and launch them in virtual lab environments, enabling realistic disaster simulations without disrupting production systems or requiring dedicated “lab” hardware.

The ioReplicate Advantage

  • Rapid Recovery: ioReplicate delivers recovery in just three clicks, ensuring operations are restored quickly and reliably.
  • Lower Costs: VergeOS reduces costs by integrating DR into its core platform and supporting cost-effective hardware.
  • Complete Confidence: Organizations gain the speed of purpose-built DR tools and the simplicity of frequent testing with the affordability of backup solutions, ensuring they are prepared for any disaster.

Ready to Overcome the High Cost of DR?

ioReplicate is an infrastructure-wide approach to disaster recovery that combines speed, simplicity, and cost savings into a single platform. With VergeOS, businesses no longer have to compromise between affordability and reliability. This same infrastructure-wide approach can help organizations meet day-to-day data protection and recovery requirements.

Learn more about how ioReplicate can reduce your disaster recovery costs and simplify your approach to business continuity. Download our white paper or schedule a demo today to see ioReplicate in action.

Conclusion

The high cost of disaster recovery is no longer a barrier to preparedness. With VergeOS and ioReplicate, organizations gain a powerful DR solution that delivers rapid recovery and cost savings, ensuring confidence and continuity in every scenario.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With:

by

IT professionals seeking a VMware alternative may also need to ensure the solution can provide an affordable and integrated SDN alternative to VMware’s software-defined networking stack, NSX. Even customers who don’t currently use NSX, live without its potential benefits because of its reputation for high cost and complex implementation, excluding it from the decision-making process.

During our recent NETdepot: From VMware to VergeOS webinar, Ben Beasley, VP of Solutions Architecture at NETdepot, shared how switching to VergeOS and its integrated software-defined networking solution, VergeFabric, provided their team with advanced features at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

The Hidden Challenges of VMware NSX

VMware NSX has long been an attractive option for organizations seeking advanced networking functions like micro-segmentation via (L3 segregation), virtualized firewalls, and routing. However, these benefits come with significant trade-offs:

  1. High Cost: NSX is not part of VMware’s standard offerings. It’s an expensive add-on that inflates licensing costs.
  2. Complex Implementation: Deploying NSX requires specialized expertise, which increases operational costs and delays time to value. Because the VMs run separately from the core ESXi, special consideration must be given to high availability and failover.

Affordable and Integrated SDN

VergeFabric: SDN Without the Overhead

When NETdepot transitioned to VergeOS, they found that VergeFabric offered comparable features to VMware NSX but with significant advantages at a lower cost. VergeFabric provides a suite of advanced capabilities, including:

  • Firewall: Built-in firewalls to secure virtual environments at every layer.
  • Routing: Integrated routing functionality to simplify and streamline network operations.
  • VPN: Secure virtual private network capabilities for connecting remote users and locations.
  • Micro-Segmentation: With L3 segregation, VergeOS can provide granular segmentation to improve security and isolate workloads.
  • BGP (Border Gateway Protocol): Support for dynamic routing protocols to enhance scalability and network performance.
  • Integrated Multi-Tenancy: Simplifies the creation of virtual private clouds, allowing organizations to isolate and manage customer environments without additional complexity or cost.

The Power of Built-In SDN

1. Built-in SDN Reduces Cost, Democratizes Capabilities

Unlike VMware NSX, which must be purchased as a separate add-on, VergeFabric is a core feature of VergeOS. This built-in approach eliminates the high costs associated with acquiring and licensing NSX, making advanced networking capabilities accessible to organizations of all sizes. An affordable and integrated SDN makes its advanced networking functionality available to all data centers, not just those who can afford it.

2. Built-in SDN Simplifies Deployment and Management

With VergeFabric, SDN is seamlessly integrated into the platform as a service. Each node within a VergeOS instance has VergeFabric functionality built into it, and network configuration data is shared across nodes. This architecture ensures that customers don’t need to worry about special high-availability configurations for SDN virtual machines, as NSX requires. The streamlined approach reduces operational overhead and ensures that networking capabilities are immediately usable.

3. Built-in SDN Improves Resource Efficiency

By integrating VergeFabric natively, VergeOS avoids the resource-heavy footprint of VMware NSX. With this reduced footprint, VergeFabric allows for more resources to be available to run workloads.

VergeFabric in Action: Simplifying Disaster Recovery

Affordable and Integrated SDN

Another value of an affordable and integrated SDN is improving DR plan execution. VergeFabric enables organizations to achieve seamless disaster recovery by combining powerful features like BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and multi-tenancy.

How It Works:

  1. Multi-Tenancy for Workload Capture:
    With VergeFabric’s multi-tenancy, IT teams can capture an entire workload as a Virtual Data Center (VDC), including all virtual machine configurations and networking settings. This captured VDC is then replicated to a remote site, ensuring a perfectly consistent copy of the production environment.
  2. BGP for Automated Failover:
    Once the VDC is replicated, VergeOS is used to configure BGP to advertise identical IP addresses from both the primary and backup sites, with different weights assigned to prioritize the primary site.
  3. Failover in Action:
    BGP automatically reroutes traffic to the backup site during a primary site outage. This process occurs without manual intervention or the need for costly third-party failover tools, minimizing service disruption and ensuring business continuity.

The Result

By leveraging VergeFabric’s integrated BGP and multi-tenancy, IT teams can simplify disaster recovery processes, achieve faster failover, and reduce operational complexity. Organizations gain a streamlined approach to business continuity that eliminates downtime and protects critical workloads.

SDN for Every Organization

NETdepot’s experience highlights the importance of accessible and affordable SDN capabilities for modern IT environments. As Ben Beasley emphasized during the webinar, VergeFabric delivers “all the capabilities of VMware NSX without the cost or complexity,” making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to optimize their infrastructure.

Conclusion


VMware’s per-core licensing model not only imposes obvious and hidden costs but also excludes many key capabilities from the standard license. Essential features often require additional purchases, creating a costly “add-on mentality” that can deter customers from adopting valuable enhancements, even when they would greatly benefit from them.

VergeFabric’s seamless integration within VergeOS provides another compelling reason to make the switch. By reducing costs, simplifying operations, and improving resource efficiency, VergeFabric ensures that SDN is no longer a luxury but a standard feature accessible to any organization.

Want to learn more?
Access our recent case studies to see how VergeOS has transformed IT environments like NETdepot’s. Register here to explore real-world examples of VMware migrations and IT modernization.

Filed Under: Networking

by

Enterprise VMware alternative lessons drawn from service providers like NETdepot—who recently transitioned from VMware to VergeIO—offer valuable insights that enterprises can apply to their data centers. In today’s environment, finding a suitable VMware alternative can be challenging, especially for enterprises looking to gain cost savings, flexibility, and improved support. By observing NETdepot’s successful migration, enterprise data centers can better understand how to address common VMware pain points and achieve an infrastructure that aligns with long-term goals.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons from NETdepot’s Transition

1. Simplified Licensing and Hardware Flexibility

For many organizations, VMware’s per-core licensing structure presents significant challenges. This model limits hardware choices, dictating processor configurations based on licensing costs rather than performance needs. The per-core structure can quickly escalate costs as enterprises adopt higher-core processors to meet increased workloads. NETdepot found that VergeIO’s per-server pricing model provided much-needed flexibility, allowing them to select hardware based on performance requirements instead of adjusting for licensing constraints.

Additionally, enterprises should be aware of the hidden costs that can accumulate under per-core licensing. These hidden costs are overlooked initially but can lead to significant budget overruns as organizations scale their infrastructure.

By choosing a VMware alternative like VergeIO, which avoids these licensing complexities, enterprises can make cost-effective hardware decisions that allow longer equipment lifespans and invest in more dense server configurations without fear of rising per-core expenses.

2. Streamlined Migration Process

Moving from VMware can seem daunting, but NETdepot’s migration experience was seamless thanks to VergeIO’s built-in VMware migration service, which allowed for rapid VM transitions with almost no downtime. One of the enterprise VMware alternative lessons is considering platforms that offer simple migration paths, helping them minimize disruptions and maintain service continuity.

3. Integrated Networking and Security

With VergeIO’s built-in routing and firewall capabilities, NETdepot was able to reduce reliance on additional appliances and VMs, lowering costs and streamlining operations. A VMware alternative with integrated Layer 2/3 networking functions for enterprise data centers can enhance security and simplify network management.

4. Strong Data Protection and Resiliency

VergeIO’s ioGuardian feature provides NETdepot with robust protection against hardware failures, adding another layer of resiliency. Enterprises should prioritize alternatives that offer integrated data protection features, enabling seamless recovery and ensuring continued operations even during unexpected events.

5. Responsive, High-Quality Support

For NETdepot, fast, reliable support was crucial. VergeIO’s responsive support team helped NETdepot avoid lengthy downtime and quickly resolved critical issues. Another of the enterprise VMware alternative lessons is to prioritize support quality and responsiveness when evaluating VMware alternatives to ensure seamless day-to-day operations.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons: VergeIO is a Solution that Delivers Value, Stability, and Security

For NETdepot, VergeIO provided a combination of features and support that addressed their concerns with VMware. The move to VergeIO helped NETdepot reduce costs, improve service quality, and enhance security. As enterprises explore VMware alternatives, NETdepot’s experience illustrates the importance of choosing a platform that integrates well with existing processes, provides a straightforward migration experience, and offers operational efficiencies that benefit both the data center and end users.

NETdepot’s Key Benefits with VergeIO:

enterprise VMware alternative lessons
  • Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Transparent pricing and licensing flexibility enable NETdepot to make cost-effective hardware choices.
  • Enhanced Performance and Stability: A stable and resilient platform that avoids the performance pitfalls of legacy solutions like vSAN.
  • Integrated Security and Networking: Built-in Layer 2/3 networking capabilities streamline network operations, reduce appliance requirements, and enhance security.
  • Rapid, High-Quality Support: VergeIO’s support team provides NETdepot with responsive, mission-critical support, ensuring they can resolve issues quickly.
  • Data Protection and Recovery: VergeIO’s ioGuardian offers resilient data protection, keeping NETdepot’s customers secure and operational in the face of hardware failures.

Want to learn more? Access the detailed NETdepot case study and other recent VergeIO customer success stories. Register for access to all of our case studies.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons: Leveraging Service Providers

NETdepot’s transition to VergeIO illustrates that service providers not only adopt powerful VMware alternatives but can offer a valuable extension of enterprise IT. By leveraging organizations like NETdepot, enterprises can address compute or storage demand spikes, facilitate disaster recovery, and offload infrastructure management to a trusted partner. This approach provides enterprises with additional capacity and increases their resiliency to unexpected events.

Join our webinar on November 14th to hear directly from NETdepot’s VP of Solutions Architecture, Ben Beasley, about the transition process and benefits of using VergeIO. Register Here to see how NETdepot’s experience can inform your VMware exit strategy.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: , , ,

by

Achieves Cost Savings, Enhanced Security, and Superior Support

Ann Arbor, MI – November 12, 2024 – VergeIO today announced that NETdepot, a leading services provider offering hosting and bare metal services, has successfully migrated from VMware to VergeIO, gaining a simplified, high-performance IT data center operating environment. This transition enhances NETdepot’s ability to deliver robust infrastructure solutions and provides its clients with cost-effective, secure, and high-quality service.

Meeting Challenges Head-On

With growing concerns surrounding VMware’s pricing and post-Broadcom acquisition roadmap, NETdepot sought an alternative to provide the performance, stability, and security they needed to support their clients.

“The switch to VergeIO provides us with the cost control and operational stability our clients rely on,” said Jeff Hinkle, CEO of NETdepot. “With VMware, we were forced to make hardware decisions based on licensing constraints and compatibility requirements, which limited flexibility. VergeIO’s licensing model allows us to select and retain hardware that best meets our needs, avoiding premature decommissioning and reducing the cost of providing infrastructure services to our customers.”

Streamlined Migration Process

The migration from VMware to VergeIO was seamless, thanks to VergeIO’s straightforward, built-in services. Unlike typical migrations that involve multiple third-party software solutions, VergeIO’s integrated approach enabled NETdepot to transition virtual machines quickly and efficiently. The entire process minimized downtime and required almost zero post-migration adjustments, ensuring NETdepot could continue to serve customers without interruption.

Comprehensive Benefits Realized

Since moving to VergeIO, NETdepot has reported several key benefits:

  • Transparent and Predictable Pricing: VergeIO’s per-server licensing eliminates the complexities of per-core pricing, empowering NETdepot to make hardware decisions free of licensing constraints.
  • Exceptional Support: VergeIO’s rapid-response support team assists within minutes, ensuring NETdepot can deliver high-quality customer service.
  • Reliable Stability: VergeIO has proven to be a stable and resilient platform, helping NETdepot avoid the disruptive downtime that could affect its clients.
  • Advanced Networking Capabilities: NETdepot leverages VergeIO’s integrated routing, firewall, and micro-segmentation capabilities to reduce reliance on external appliances, reducing operational complexity and costs.
  • Enhanced Data Protection: VergeIO offers comprehensive data protection, including performance-impact-free snapshots that provide rapid recovery points with minimal data loss. VergeIO’s ioGuardian adds an extra layer of resiliency from multiple simultaneous drive or server failures, which means their customers stay up and running even during catastrophic failures.
  • Enhanced Security: Virtual Data Centers ensure client isolation, creating an innately secure environment. Built-in ransomware alerts further safeguard NETdepot’s infrastructure and clients.

Positioned for Long-Term Success

The transition to VergeIO positions NETdepot for future growth across its core business and subsidiaries while strengthening strategic relationships with its vital hardware vendor, SuperMicro. Leveraging this collaboration, NETdepot can rapidly deploy four VergeIO bare metal configurations, enabling tailored solutions for its diverse customer needs. Additionally, NETdepot offers comprehensive migration services, making it seamless for customers transitioning from VMware to VergeIO. This combination allows NETdepot to meet the evolving demands of its expanding client base by delivering a stable, secure, and scalable environment.

“NETdepot’s success exemplifies how VergeIO empowers service providers with the flexibility and cost efficiency needed to succeed in today’s market,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “We’re thrilled to see NETdepot benefit from our integrated, high-performance virtualization platform and look forward to continuing our collaboration to meet their evolving needs.”

Alongside the NETdepot announcement, VergeIO is launching a new Case Studies page showcasing recent customer successes. This page highlights five of VergeIO’s latest customer wins, reflecting the versatility and reliability of VergeIO’s platform across different industries. Potential customers can register to access the complete list of case studies through a single, streamlined registration process. View the Case Studies page here.

Join us for a VergeIO/NETdepot webinar on Thursday, November 14th at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT to hear more: Register Here.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization, offering an integrated, single-code-based data center operating system that consolidates virtualization, storage, and networking into a single, unified platform. VergeIO empowers organizations to reduce costs and streamline operations by simplifying IT infrastructure and enabling effortless scalability.

About NETdepot

NETdepot is a premier managed services and cloud provider delivering hosting, bare metal, and high-touch IT support. With a commitment to reliable infrastructure and unmatched service quality, NETdepot serves organizations seeking performance-driven and secure IT environments.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Judy Smith, JPR Communications
[email protected]
818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release

by

Many organizations are searching for ways to eliminate server refreshes and stretch the lifespan of their IT infrastructure.—essentially replace only what’s necessary, when it’s necessary. A benefit of this approach is the reduction in e-waste.

Eliminate Server Refreshes

Server refreshes are often seen as unavoidable, driven by technological advances that lead IT teams to replace aging servers with new models. Software companies force upgrades by decommissioning older servers even if they are still useful. VergeIO’s ioOptimize makes the elimination of server refreshes achievable. By balancing workloads across servers of different generations, ioOptimize enables organizations to keep older hardware running as long as it’s operational, integrating new servers gradually and avoiding disruptive, costly refreshes.

Extending the Life of Existing Servers

An obvious way to eliminate server refreshes is to extend the life of existing servers. Traditional infrastructure software often fails to effectively leverage older servers alongside new, more advanced hardware, turning aging machines into liabilities as they struggle to handle modern workloads. VergeOS’s efficiency and low overhead breathe new life into aging server hardware. With ioOptimize, these older servers can safely serve valuable roles within the infrastructure as long as they remain functional.

To help eliminate server refreshes, ioOptimize uses machine learning (ML) and narrow artificial intelligence (AI) to allocate workloads and resources across mixed-generation environments. By continuously monitoring each server’s health, capacity, and performance, ioOptimize ensures that even aging servers are utilized optimally without compromising stability. If an older server shows signs of potential failure, ioOptimize can migrate workloads to healthier servers, maintaining uptime without immediate replacements.

This approach enables companies to extend their hardware investments, deferring the need for new hardware until absolutely necessary, ultimately reducing costs and increasing return on investment.

Eliminate Server Refreshes by Balancing Workloads

Integrating powerful new servers into an environment with aging hardware can create workload-balancing challenges. Traditional virtualization and management software often struggle to distribute workloads across servers with varying performance capabilities effectively.

ioOptimize resolves this challenge by balancing workloads across servers, taking advantage of older and newer resources. ML algorithms within ioOptimize assess each server’s unique characteristics—such as processing power, storage capacity, and network speed—distributing tasks accordingly. This allows IT to eliminate server refreshes by assigning older servers to handle lighter workloads. In contrast, more demanding tasks are assigned to newer hardware, optimizing the efficiency of the entire infrastructure.

For a more detailed understanding of how ioOptimize enables seamless integration of aging hardware and newer servers, access VergeIO’s white paper on ioOptimize. This comprehensive guide explains how ioOptimize supports extended hardware lifecycles and introduces VergeIO’s per-server licensing model, which offers a cost-effective alternative to restrictive per-core licenses. Additionally, it covers ioOptimize’s automated “scale-down” feature, which helps reduce data center footprints by consolidating servers, saving on power, cooling, and space.

Seamlessly Integrating New Hardware

One of the key advantages of ioOptimize is its ability to integrate new servers into existing environments easily. When new hardware is added, ioOptimize’s intelligent algorithms detect and adjust to the capabilities of the new servers, leveraging these resources to improve performance.

For example, if new servers offer enhanced network capabilities or increased processing power, ioOptimize automatically incorporates these upgrades into its workload distribution, maximizing efficiency without the need for manual reconfiguration. This process minimizes downtime, allowing the data center to evolve smoothly over time instead of undergoing disruptive overhauls.

Eliminate Server Refreshes with Incremental Upgrades

ioOptimize allows older servers to operate alongside new hardware, supporting a continuous, incremental upgrade strategy. Instead of undergoing frequent, large-scale hardware replacements, organizations can introduce new servers as needed, reducing both capital expenditures and the operational impact of major upgrades.

With ioOptimize, IT teams can manage server refreshes at their own pace based on specific operational needs and budget considerations. Older hardware can continue in use until fully depreciated, while new servers are added to the infrastructure gradually. This approach reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO)erm and eliminates the financial strain of routine refresh cycles. Instead of IT having to deal with the hidden costs of per core models, VergeIO’s licensing model is per server. It doesn’t punish customers for buying fewer quad-processor servers than dual over the long processor servers. Also, ioOptimize can automate the shrinking of a VergeOS instance in case you want to move to fewer, more powerful servers.

Eliminate Server Refreshes for A Sustainable IT Infrastructure

As sustainability becomes a priority, reducing hardware waste is increasingly important. ioOptimize maximizes the useful life of each server, contributing directly to sustainability goals. Extending the lifespan of aging servers not only saves on costs but also reduces e-waste and environmental impact.

For more on how virtualization strategies like ioOptimize can support sustainable, high-performance data centers, register for VergeIO’s on-demand webinar, “Can Virtualization Enhance Sustainability?” Hosted by TruthInIT, this webinar includes insights from VergeIO experts and SmallWorldBigData analysts on extending server life, adopting energy-efficient hardware, and building sustainable IT operations.

Efficient resource management and gradual upgrades with ioOptimize can lower power usage, reduce cooling demands, and minimize environmental impact, all while meeting performance needs and budget constraints.

Server and data availability is another criticla requirment to safely leverage aging server hardware. VergeOS these capabilities built in. Watch our on-demand demsonstration to see these capabilites in action.

Conclusion

ioOptimize presents a practical solution to the limitations of traditional server refresh cycles. By balancing workloads across mixed-generation hardware and integrating new servers seamlessly, ioOptimize eliminates the need for disruptive refreshes. Organizations can extend the life of their existing hardware, reduce capital costs, and meet sustainability goals by using a gradual, incremental upgrade strategy.

If you’re looking to maximize the value of your hardware investments and build a sustainable, scalable infrastructure, ioOptimize can help. Learn more about how ioOptimize supports extended hardware life and enhanced efficiency on our ioOptimize landing page.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: ,