George Crump

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ANN ARBOR, MI – August 5, 2025 – VergeIO, the Ultraconverged Infrastructure company, today announced that Topgolf, the global sports entertainment leader, has standardized on VergeOS to modernize its IT infrastructure across all Topgolf offices, data centers, and  venue edge data centers. The selection followed a rigorous evaluation process triggered by escalating costs and complexity from VMware’s licensing model under Broadcom ownership.

Topgolf is a global sports entertainment company and a subsidiary of Topgolf Callaway Brands (NYSE: MODG), operating over 100 high-tech venues across the United States and worldwide, including locations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Each venue offers an interactive golf gaming experience that blends physical gameplay with digital analytics. Players use real golf clubs and balls embedded with RFID, aiming at a field of electronically monitored targets. Toptracer technology visually tracks every shot in real-time, while advanced analytics systems power extended reality games and provide performance insights. These venues are social destinations, offering climate-controlled hitting bays, a full-service bar, dining options, and private event spaces.

Topgolf is replacing a sprawling VMware deployment on Dell VxRail with a leaner, more efficient three-node architecture per site, thanks to VergeOS’ increased efficiency. The company is eliminating third-party backup software and hardware after validating VergeOS’ built-in data protection capabilities, including ioClone, ioGuardian, and ioReplicate. Read the detailed case study here.

“At Topgolf, technology is the heart of our player experience, that’s how we deliver value,” said Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure at Topgolf. “VergeOS gives us the control, flexibility, and resilience we need at every venue—and in VergeIO, we found a partner that understands how we operate and what we need to move fast.”

Topgolf is managing its entire environment—venues and data center alike—using VergeOS Site Manager and Virtual Data Centers (VDCs). The architecture supports tenant-level isolation, real-time observability, and rapid upgrades across time zones without impacting venue operations. VergeOS’ API-first design has enabled Topgolf to automate infrastructure tasks, including deployment, maintenance, and power-loss recovery processes that previously required 30–45 minutes of manual effort per site.

“This is what we built VergeOS for,” said Greg Campbell, Founder and CTO of VergeIO. “When you’re managing hundreds of locations, each with real-time workloads and high uptime requirements, you can’t rely on legacy stacks that were designed for centralized enterprise IT. VergeOS gives organizations like Topgolf a unified, automated, and resilient platform from core to edge—without compromise.”

By consolidating hypervisor, storage, networking, data protection, and management into a single platform, VergeOS is helping Topgolf reduce infrastructure costs. Topgolf will realize significant annualized savings by moving to VergeOS, while increasing operational agility and preparing for future AI-driven experiences with VergeIQ.

To learn more, register here for the VergeIO/Topgolf webinar on 8/14 at 1:00 pm ET.

For more information, visit www.verge.io or contact [email protected].

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

Filed Under: Press Release

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To exit VMware, Topgolf is choosing VergeOS across more than 100 venues and its central data center. The company is replacing a mix of VMware software, vxRail hardware, and third-party backup with a single, integrated platform.

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Each venue now runs a three-node VergeOS cluster. The infrastructure supports Kubernetes-based services, camera systems, real-time analytics, and venue-specific compliance workloads. VergeOS provides Topgolf with a repeatable design that runs consistently at every site, eliminating the need for multiple point products.

Why Topgolf Moved Away from VMware

The decision started with licensing. After Broadcom acquired VMware, Topgolf saw projected costs increase by 400%. Even with negotiation, the savings weren’t enough to rebuild trust in the platform. Changes to licensing terms, feature bundling, and support made future planning unpredictable.

Instead of waiting for more confusion, the team evaluated alternatives. VergeIO stood out for its simplicity and control. The team needed software they could operate without licensing constraints or hardware lock-in. VergeOS delivered that.

Migration Experience

Topgolf executes the migration to VergeOS with minimal disruption using ioMigrate. Each site follows a repeatable process that allows the team to move from VMware to VergeOS, perform upgrades, and validate functionality within a few hours.

One venue was scheduled for migration the night before an unplanned board visit. The site went live on VergeOS ahead of schedule. The following morning, the board meeting took place as planned—with no awareness that a complete platform transition had occurred the night before.

This confirmed that VergeOS could meet operational demands without requiring venue downtime. Based on this result, the team is proceeding confidently with phased rollouts across all other sites.

Topgolf is Choosing VergeOS

Every Topgolf venue runs independently. VergeOS handles all core infrastructure functions—virtualization, storage, networking, snapshots, replication, and more. Topgolf doesn’t rely on a WAN link or central controller to keep a location online. That matters when the business runs from 9 a.m. to midnight and can’t afford downtime.

Venue Deployment at Scale

The VergeOS deployment strategy includes more than 100 three-node clusters. Topgolf is replacing 6-node vxRail appliances and separate backup infrastructure with leaner 3-node configurations, utilizing standard Dell servers that offer improved performance and lower costs. VergeOS’s deduplication and resource efficiency allowed them to downsize nodes without sacrificing performance.

Operational Simplicity and Resilience

The IT team uses VergeOS Site Manager to control operations across all venues and their central data center. They organized deployments into three tenets—East, Central, and West—corresponding to the respective time zones. This design supports regional upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery without overlapping maintenance windows.

Topgolf is choosing VergeOS

For data protection, the company replaced Rubrik with VergeOS’s built-in data protection. VergeOS uses ioClone for snapshots, ioGuardian for data repair and enhanced resiliency, and ioReplicate for near real-time DR across tenants. These features are integrated into the core platform and do not require add-ons or separate licenses.

Topgolf leveraged ioMetrics and its Terraform provider to build automated recovery workflows using VergeOS’s API. If a venue loses power, the system shuts down workloads within 15 minutes. That entire sequence used to take up to 45 minutes of manual intervention per site. When power returns, VergeOS automatically restarts operations and posts a Slack notification to the operations team.

VergeOS Deduplication: A Fundamentally Different Approach

VergeOS’ Global Inline Deduplication is a stand-out capability for Topgolf, demonstrating unique capabilities versus competing solutions. It is fundamentally different from traditional solutions because deduplication is not an afterthought but a foundational component of the entire infrastructure. Rather than being a bolt-on feature, deduplication is an integral part of the storage fabric itself, utilizing the same metadata for both deduplication and file system management, resulting in negligible overhead. This integration enables customers to use it without impacting performance while enjoying one of the industry’s best deduplication ratios.

VergeOS’s Global Deduplication is set apart by its global scope and infrastructure awareness. The hypervisor and networking are fully aware of deduplication, allowing data across all components to be deduplicated once for the entire infrastructure, unlike traditional solutions that work at the storage layer. The global capabilities ensure that no data is sent over the WAN more than once, making it ideal for multi-site deployments while achieving 4:1 or greater deduplication ratios and providing unique benefits, such as ransomware detection through data pattern analysis.

Improvements to the Player Experience

Players don’t see infrastructure, but they notice when it fails. VergeOS has enabled Topgolf to reduce recovery times, eliminate disruptions during upgrades, and keep local applications online even when a fiber cut occurs.

Faster restarts and uninterrupted venue availability directly support a smoother guest experience. This becomes particularly critical when venues host events, run tournaments, or handle high guest volumes.

The team plans to use VergeIQ, VergeIO’s integrated AI platform, for real-time player analytics and swing classification. The infrastructure is in place with GPU-equipped nodes at the central data center. These capabilities will enable Topgolf to build new guest features without requiring data to be moved to the cloud.

Cost, Scale, and Control

Topgolf expects to achieve significant annual savings by eliminating VMware, Rubrik, and vXrail. But cost wasn’t the only goal. The VergeOS deployment provides them with better operational control, a consistent platform across locations, and the flexibility to run future workloads where they make the most sense—either on-site or in the core.

VergeOS provides Topgolf with a platform that aligns with their business model: repeatable, efficient, and capable of running anywhere.

Filed Under: VMwareExit Tagged With: , ,

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Advanced Data Resilience

An advanced data resilience strategy is crucial when evaluating alternatives to VMware. As organizations begin their research, they encounter many hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. However, legitimate HCI performance and resilience concerns arise, leading many to hesitate about leaving familiar All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) and traditional three-tier architectures.

The VergeOS white paper, “Solving the HCI High-Performance Problem,” addresses these performance issues. This article focuses on advanced data resilience, detailing how VergeOS resolves common HCI resiliency limitations, enabling organizations to confidently transition away from traditional architectures and AFAs.

Executive Summary – Advanced Data Resilience

VergeOS provides a sophisticated and comprehensive advanced data resilience architecture designed to outperform traditional All-Flash Array (AFA) and Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions. Its multi-layered design includes synchronous replication, High Availability (HA) clustering, ioGuardian fault tolerance, and ioClone snapshot technology, ensuring continuous operations and superior resilience even during severe hardware failures. This technical brief details how VergeOS’s integrated solutions deliver exceptional reliability, backed by compelling real-world use cases and measurable customer outcomes.

Attend our upcoming webinar, How to Replace Your AFA, where we will cover all aspects of VMware and AFA replacement, including migration, performance, and data resiliency.

Advanced Data Resilience Foundation: Drive Protection

Architecture Overview

VergeOS implements synchronous replication to ensure immediate redundancy of data across all cluster nodes. Write operations are confirmed only after successfully synchronizing with all replicas, maintaining strict data consistency and preventing data loss, a significant advancement over traditional RAID systems. This replication occurs in real-time and utilizes global inline deduplication, minimizing storage overhead and network bandwidth requirements. Unlike traditional RAID controllers and external arrays, VergeOS’s replication mechanism efficiently mirrors only unique data segments, enhancing performance and simplifying storage management.

Operational Mechanics of Advanced Data Resilience

When a drive failure occurs, virtual machines (VMs) continue running without interruption on their original hosts. VergeOS employs advanced network protocols that transparently retrieve mirrored data from healthy cluster nodes, ensuring uninterrupted operations without performance degradation.

Advanced Data Resilience: Continuity

Failover Architecture

VergeOS’s HA clustering ensures that complete server node failures do not lead to service interruptions. In the event of a full node outage, affected virtual machines automatically migrate to healthy cluster nodes. This migration leverages already synchronized data replicas, ensuring immediate data availability and continuous service operation.

Advanced Data Resilience AND Rapid Recovery

Rigorous production environment testing demonstrates VergeOS’s capability to recover from a full server node failure within approximately 90 seconds, including a complete VM restart. Rapid recovery is achievable due to pre-existing data mirrors and streamlined failover mechanisms, outperforming traditional SAN and AFA systems, which typically experience longer downtime periods.

Intelligent Resource Orchestration

HA clustering in VergeOS features intelligent orchestration that selects the optimal target host based on current resource availability. This automated and dynamic resource allocation prevents contention, maintains high performance levels, and guarantees consistent service delivery during and after failover events.

Advanced Data Resilience: N+X Protection

Superior Multi-Fault Protection

ioGuardian technology sets VergeOS apart by maintaining continuous data access even when experiencing simultaneous failures across multiple drives and nodes. This advanced fault-tolerant mechanism surpasses the redundancy provided by traditional AFAs and competitive hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, ensuring superior reliability in catastrophic failure scenarios.

Continuous Operation in Extreme Scenarios Delivers Advanced Data Resilience

ioGuardian ensures continuous VM operation even during severe hardware failures. It creates an independent, third copy of data stored on a separate VergeOS server(s), external to the primary production environment. When the production environment experiences multiple simultaneous node or drive failures, the ioGuardian server provides data fragments to instantly reconstruct any required data in real-time. This capability enables uninterrupted VM access, eliminating downtime or noticeable degradation during extreme failure conditions.

Technical Implementation

The ioGuardian architecture includes an external VergeOS instance that stores an independent third-party data replica. Advanced algorithms within the primary VergeOS environment dynamically leverage this external copy. As long as at least one node remains active in the production cluster, ioGuardian reconstructs and delivers necessary data fragments instantly and transparently. This design ensures continuous VM availability and operational integrity, exceeding the fault tolerance capabilities of traditional AFAs or HCI solutions.

Advanced Data Resilience: Recovery

Storage-Layer Snapshots

VergeOS’s ioClone technology provides instant snapshot capabilities directly at the storage layer without impacting the performance of running applications. Unlike traditional snapshot approaches that rely on incremental data chains or external backup systems, ioClone provides immediate, independent, and reliable recovery points.

Space-Efficient Retention

Global inline deduplication enables ioClone to store snapshots efficiently, using minimal storage resources. This efficiency allows organizations to maintain unlimited snapshots over extended periods, addressing the retention challenges and storage constraints commonly associated with traditional snapshot technologies.

Granular and Rapid Recovery

ioClone facilitates recovery at multiple granular levels—individual files, full virtual machines, or entire Virtual Data Centers (VDCs). Recovery operations complete in seconds, dramatically enhancing operational agility and ensuring compliance with rigorous data protection and recovery requirements.

Advanced Data Resilience: Networking

Eliminating Data Locality Limitations

VergeOS uses an optimized internode networking protocol designed to accelerate data transfer between cluster nodes. Unlike traditional architectures dependent on data locality, VergeOS retrieves data across nodes rapidly and efficiently. VergeOS’s deduplication engine, as it is available to the entire infrastructure, reduces network traffic by 60-80%, thereby lowering bandwidth demands and maintaining optimal performance even during fault conditions. The combination of the network protocol and data efficiency is critical in high-performance and data-intensive environments.

Accelerating Synchronous Replication and ioGuardian

The optimized networking protocol powers VergeOS’s synchronous replication and ioGuardian technologies. Synchronous replication instantly mirrors data, thanks to fast communication between nodes. Similarly, ioGuardian leverages rapid cross-node data retrieval to reconstruct data fragments instantly, providing continuous access during severe failure scenarios.

Technical Advantages

The efficiency of VergeOS internode communication results in sub-millisecond latency during cross-node data access. Extensive testing demonstrates consistent performance that exceeds that of traditional SAN or HCI solutions. This capability enhances system responsiveness, reliability, and advanced data resilience, allowing IT teams to confidently eliminate data locality constraints from infrastructure design.

Conclusion

VergeOS’s integrated, multi-layered, advanced data resilience approach delivers superior data protection, operational resilience, and infrastructure simplification. By combining synchronous replication, High Availability clustering, ioGuardian fault tolerance, and ioClone snapshot capabilities, organizations can confidently transition from traditional AFA solutions, avoiding the AFA tax, to VergeOS. For a deeper dive into these topics, register for our “Data Availability Analysis” white paper.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: , , , ,

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The VergeIO + Solidigm AFA Replacement Kit is designed for IT teams looking for an AFA Alternative that doesn’t compromise on performance or data resiliency. It combines your existing servers with VergeOS and Solidigm’s NVMe SSDs to create a powerful, server-based storage fabric. The result is a simpler, faster, and more cost-effective solution than traditional SANs and hyperconverged stacks.

The Value of an AFA Alternative

The AFA Replacement Kit is available through VergeIO authorized resellers. It includes VergeOS and Solidigm SSDs packaged together to deliver better value than purchasing each component independently. More importantly, it’s designed to remove the guesswork from SAN replacement projects by providing the right software and hardware combination.

VergeOS—a unified platform for virtualization, storage, AI, and networking — is licensed per server. That means no variable pricing based on features, storage capacity, cores, or the number of virtual machines. The pricing model is easy to understand, easy to forecast, and built to scale.

An AFA Alternative with a VMware Exit

Many organizations considering an all-flash array refresh are also rethinking their hypervisor strategy. The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has disrupted licensing models, partner relationships, and confidence in the long-term roadmap. For IT teams planning a storage upgrade, this presents an opportunity to address two problems simultaneously.

The VergeIO + Solidigm AFA Replacement Kit offers a clear path to exit both the SAN and VMware platforms. VergeOS replaces the hypervisor, SAN, and backup layers with a single software-defined environment. There is no need to manage new licensing agreements, convert workloads to different file formats, or purchase additional software for storage functionality.

Organizations can shift away from VMware while upgrading storage at the same time. The combined result is a simplified architecture, predictable cost structure, and more control over future infrastructure decisions. Our customers consistently report a 5X to 10X cost savings.

An AFA Alternative with a VMware Exit

An AFA Alternative With a Unified Architecture

VergeOS eliminates the traditional boundaries between compute, storage, and networking. Each node in the cluster can be assigned to compute, storage, or both. The architecture adapts to the environment, whether it’s a compact edge deployment or a multi-rack data center.

Data is mirrored across nodes at the disk level. There’s no need for RAID controllers, external failover scripts, or layered cluster software. VergeOS handles availability natively, because it’s built into the core of the platform.

The system supports a variety of drive types and endurance levels. Administrators can use Solidigm TLC and QLC drives in the same environment, assign tiers, and migrate VMs between them without interruption. This flexibility enables easy alignment of storage costs with performance requirements.

Deployments scale without reconfiguration. A two-node edge cluster and a 200-node private cloud run on the same software, managed from the same interface. VergeIO’s integrated Site Manager enables the single-pane-of-glass management of hundreds of sites.

An AFA Alternative with Seamless Migration

Every AFA Replacement Kit includes ioMigrate, VergeIO’s built-in tool for moving workloads from VMware environments to VergeOS. The process is straightforward and does not require specialized migration services or complex conversions.

Step 1: Install Solidigm Drives
Install Solidigm NVMe SSDs into existing servers or newly added storage nodes. VergeOS recognizes and provisions the capacity immediately. Storage-dense nodes can be added where needed, and compute nodes or GPU nodes can access that storage across the cluster.

Step 2: Migrate with ioMigrate
ioMigrate uses VMware’s Backup API to extract virtual machines from the existing SAN through VMware. The data is written directly to VergeOS, now running on Solidigm flash. There is no conversion process or downtime during the initial migration. Virtual machines run natively on VergeOS once the data is in place.

Step 3: Final Sync and Cutover
Once workloads are validated on VergeOS, ioMigrate performs a final sync using VMware’s changed block tracking (CBT). CBT ensures that only modified data is transferred. The legacy SAN can then be decommissioned or repurposed for archival or backup use.

An AFA Alternative with Broad Workload Support

VergeOS is designed to run the types of workloads commonly found in data centers. This includes:

  • Windows Server and Linux
  • SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other databases
  • Domain services like Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP
  • File services and print servers
  • VDI platforms
  • AI and machine learning workloads running on GPU-enabled nodes

While VergeOS is not designed for bare-metal workloads, many organizations find that applications previously run on physical servers perform better once virtualized within VergeOS. The platform’s tight integration and high-performance storage eliminate many of the bottlenecks that previously limited virtualized performance.

An AFA Alternative: Built-In Data Protection

VergeOS includes a complete set of tools for availability, data protection, and disaster recovery—built into the platform, not bolted on afterward.

ioClone enables space-efficient snapshots at the virtual machine or disk level. Clones are created instantly and can be used for rollback, backup, or testing. There is no penalty for frequent snapshots.

An AFA Alternative with built in data protection

ioGuardian manages real-time data availability. When a node or drive fails, it triggers immediate failover using mirrored data from healthy nodes. If failures exceed mirror protection—such as multiple simultaneous node or drive failures—ioGuardian maintains availability using distributed object awareness. This capability exceeds what three- or four-way mirroring systems can typically recover from.

Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) enable administrators to logically and securely segment environments. VDCs contain their own compute, storage, and networking configurations, making them ideal for multi-tenant environments, departmental isolation, or testing and development.

ioReplicate enables asynchronous replication between VergeOS clusters. Replication can be scheduled, targeted by VM or VDC, and used for point-in-time recovery or to test failover without interrupting production.

Unified is Better Than HCI

Companies like Nutanix offer hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as an alternative to AFA, but these platforms layer storage on top of an existing hypervisor as a separate virtual machine. This “stack” adds overhead and complexity—and leaves customers managing multiple control planes.

VergeOS does not create a stack; it flattens it. The hypervisor, storage system, and data protection services are all part of a single codebase. That means better performance, easier upgrades, and fewer moving parts.

An AFA Alternative that is efficient and performs as well as a dedicated AFA

To learn more about how VergeOS compares to other HCI architectures, watch our on-demand webinar “Comparing vSAN Alternatives.”

Ideal Use Cases for the AFA Replacement Kit

The AFA Replacement Kit fits best in organizations that:

  • Are replacing aging SAN infrastructure
  • Want to reduce cost (by 10X) without reducing availability
  • Are planning a VMware exit and need storage continuity
  • Want to simplify management and reduce dependency on multiple vendors
  • Prefer to extend the life of existing hardware instead of investing in new appliances

Not Another Storage Silo

This program is not a hardware launch. VergeIO is not entering the storage array market. The AFA Replacement Kit is designed to help customers utilize existing or off-the-shelf servers, eliminating the need for an external SAN without requiring the replacement of another standalone product.

There are no controllers, no shared chassis, and no fixed hardware configurations. Customers build the environment they need, using the servers they own.

Summary: A Purpose-Built Replacement

The VergeIO + Solidigm AFA Replacement Kit is a comprehensive AFA replacement that uses your existing servers to deliver enhanced control, improved performance, and a VMware exit, all while offering lower costs, with fewer hardware components and fewer moving parts.

It works because it’s built from the ground up to do what the modern data center requires—and nothing it doesn’t.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: , ,

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 22nd, 2025

VergeIO and Solidigm Introduce “The AFA Replacement Kit” to Eliminate the Complexity and Cost of Dedicated Flash Arrays

ANN ARBOR, MI — July 22, 2025 —  VergeIO, the VMware alternative and pioneer in ultraconverged infrastructure, and Solidigm, a leader in enterprise data storage, today announced the launch of The AFA Replacement Kit—an offering designed to replace traditional all-flash arrays with a simpler, more cost-effective infrastructure solution.

The AFA Replacement Kit brings together three (3) Solidigm™ 4TB enterprise SSDs and a VergeOS server license combined into one streamlined platform. Along with your servers, it’s a complete, ready-to-run infrastructure solution designed to deliver performance, resiliency, and simplicity.

“Customers are tired of bloated hardware stacks and complex licensing schemes,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “This kit gives them everything they need to run high-performance workloads—without the operational baggage.”

The AFA Replacement Kit offers IT a turnkey alternative to aging all-flash infrastructure, reducing costs, simplifying operations, and enhancing performance through software-defined efficiency. All IT needs to do is insert the included flash drives into empty drive bays in existing servers, and they’re ready to deploy VergeOS.

VergeIO customers have reported reducing storage costs by a factor of ten, in addition to the added savings from eliminating expensive VMware licensing and support agreements.

“We simply inserted the drives into our existing servers, and VergeOS picked them up immediately,” said Brian Bazzell, Director of IT at the City of St. Peters, Missouri. “It now handles all of our production data and guarantees performance for our critical workloads while protecting it automatically. We saved tens of thousands of dollars by using this approach instead of refreshing our Nimble array.”

“VergeIO’s software platform unlocks the full potential of Solidigm enterprise SSDs,” said Greg Matson, Senior Vice President, Head of Products and Marketing at Solidigm. “Together, we deliver performance and efficiency that legacy architectures can’t match. We’re focused on pushing the boundaries of storage technology to help customers optimize across modern compute workloads, including today’s hyperconverged infrastructure demands.”

As part of the campaign launch, VergeIO and Solidigm will host a joint webinar on July 31, 2025, 1:00PM ET titled “How to Replace Your AFA—While Improving Performance and Slashing Costs,” featuring a live demonstration and migration strategies. Click here to register: https://www.verge.io/webinar-how-to-replace-your-afa/

About VergeIO
VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative, delivering a unified platform that converges virtualization, storage, networking, AI, and backup into a single software-defined solution. Learn more at verge.io.

About Solidigm
Solidigm, a pioneer in enterprise data storage, leverages decades of product leadership and technical innovation to help customers propel into the data-centric future with a robust end-to-end product portfolio for core data centers to the edge. Explore www.solidigm.com.

Media Contact:
Judy Smith
JPR Communications
[email protected]

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: ,

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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

Simplifying Public Sector DR

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.

Simplifying Public Sector DR

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. Also, 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 manually re-sync systems or troubleshoot replication failures under pressure.

Simplifying Public Sector DR

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.

Filed Under: Protection