Topgolf Standardizes on VergeOS Across 100+ Venues, Offices and Core Data Centers

Infrastructure as a Competitive Advantage

Topgolf, a global sports entertainment company and a subsidiary of Topgolf Callaway Brands (NYSE: MODG), operates more than 100 high-tech venues across the United States and worldwide, including locations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Players use real golf clubs and balls embedded with RFID, aiming at a field of electronically monitored targets. Toptracer technology tracks every shot in real time, and advanced analytics systems power extended reality games and deliver performance insights to every bay.

The venues are social destinations, with climate-controlled hitting bays, a full-service bar, dining, and private event spaces. Behind that experience sits a specialized and distributed IT infrastructure. Each venue is an autonomous edge data center that runs with minimal dependence on central resources, supporting real-time data capture, rendering, and analytics. At Topgolf, infrastructure drives player experience, revenue continuity, and future innovation.

“We’re a technology company masquerading as a sports and entertainment company. At Topgolf, technology is the heart of our player experience. Without it, we’re a driving range with an attached restaurant and bar.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

Scott Forehand leads the VergeOS transition. He brings nearly three decades of experience in technology, enterprise architecture, SDDC design, and virtualization platforms, and he guided Topgolf’s evolution from a traditional IT environment to an orchestrated, software-defined infrastructure. He is a recognized leader in the IT community, serving as a Dallas/Fort Worth user group leader and an Elevate Technology User Group Ambassador.

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, joined Scott on the project. Jason managed the evaluation and testing of alternative platforms and led the multi-month proof of concept, the automation work, and the national rollout. His 20-year career spans critical infrastructure roles at Entrust Datacard and the Canadian Department of National Defense, with expertise in virtual desktop infrastructure, Dell VxRail, GPU workloads, and infrastructure as code.

Licensing Shock and a Collapse in Trust

Topgolf standardized its venues on Dell VxRail hyperconverged systems in 2017, on top of a virtualization platform it had run for decades. Forehand describes the company’s connection to that platform as one that “ran very deep,” and Topgolf staff sat on the vendor’s customer councils.

Broadcom’s acquisition changed the economics of that environment quickly. Perpetual licensing gave way to aggressive subscription bundles, products folded into fewer and costlier SKUs, and support contracts became more expensive and less flexible.

For Topgolf the math was stark. Projected licensing costs for the VxRail software stack were set to rise 400 percent. A jump of that size turns a routine renewal into a platform decision, and it made long-term planning around the existing roadmap untenable. The team began modeling alternatives for every venue, office, lab, and data center in the footprint.

Selecting VergeOS: Functionality, Flexibility, and Partnership

VergeIO emerged as a top candidate for its technical depth and for how it engaged with the team. From the first conversations, VergeIO committed to shared success. It co-developed a Terraform provider, helped Topgolf build support for Terraform and Ansible early in the migration, turned around feature requests quickly, and worked directly with Topgolf engineers on advanced workflows. VergeOS is API-first, so Topgolf kept its existing infrastructure-as-code practice intact through the move.

Where other vendors led with sales tactics, VergeIO led with architecture. VergeOS replaces the hypervisor, storage, and network layers with one cohesive operating system. Virtualization, storage services, networking, disaster recovery, and high availability all run from a centralized control plane, and a modern API layer exposes the whole platform to automation and observability tools.

Tenancy decided the evaluation. VergeOS Virtual Data Centers split one deployment into isolated tenants, each acting as an independent data center, and that structure fit an environment that had outgrown its previous management tools.

“With VergeIO, we have been able to segregate our deployment into tenants by time zone, making upgrades and maintenance much easier. We’ve even been able to leverage tenancy to build nested labs within a single VergeIO cluster, which has saved [us] considerably on the requirement for lab hardware.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

“VergeIO wasn’t selling a SKU. They were investing in our success. That’s what set them apart. VergeIO reset the bar for how I evaluate partner relationships.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

“VergeIO has proven their value as a strategic partner for Topgolf, and the platform has been bulletproof.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

From Six-Node VxRail to Three-Node VergeOS

Venue Standardization

Topgolf’s venue deployments are moving from six-node Dell VxRail clusters with 35TB of storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB of storage capacity. The smaller design cuts hardware and power requirements at each site with no loss of performance. VergeOS inline, block-level deduplication removes redundant data across VMs and storage volumes, so the team runs more workloads on fewer resources, stretches available capacity, and improves backup efficiency.

Each venue supports a demanding mix of workloads, including Kubernetes microservices, Windows and Linux servers, camera systems with machine learning, ball-tracking analytics, state-specific compliance applications, and AV integration. Those real-time demands call for autonomous edge clusters that keep running through WAN interruptions or local outages, with no central dependency.

VxRail held each venue to a five-node cluster minimum. VergeOS runs the same venue on three nodes.

“VergeOS is smart enough to run efficiently on three, and that means real savings.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

Some workloads are unique to Topgolf. Toptracer, the company’s proprietary machine learning ball-tracing system, runs inside the VergeOS cluster, and VergeIO engineers worked with the Topgolf team to tune how its camera traffic moves across the nodes.

“Toptracer … pushes about 40TB of network data from the cameras in a typical 102-bay venue per day. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and the VergeIO team helped us solve some latency and pathing issues with that traffic to spread the load more effectively across the nodes in the cluster.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

Data Center Modernization

Topgolf maintains a centralized data center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for internal systems such as business intelligence, corporate data platforms, and centralized management services. VergeOS now runs at this core site with the same architecture as the venues, which simplifies maintenance, replication, and automation across every location.

The team also deployed two VergeOS nodes equipped with NVIDIA L40 GPUs. These nodes do not yet run production AI workloads. They stand ready for VergeIQ, the AI infrastructure framework built directly into VergeOS. VergeIQ runs AI inference, RAG pipelines, and model training alongside traditional workloads with no external orchestration layer such as Kubernetes. Topgolf plans to put these capabilities to work on real-time swing analysis, shot trajectory modeling, and personalized player metrics.

“We started this AI project before COVID. VergeOS gives us the platform to finally finish it, without sending data to the cloud and without much additional spend.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

Migration at Scale

The project covers roughly 12,000 virtual machines. In about six months, Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with roughly 400 commodity Dell PowerEdge servers. The work went well past a software swap. Forehand says the hardest part was coordinating the projects that ran alongside the server stack replacement, starting with a rebuilt game platform.

“On VxRail, Topgolf gaming was powered by the servers. With VergeIO, we simplified the gaming stack and moved everything to the edge game panels in the bay. That meant we had to replace all of the game panels, rewire the columns, replace the server stack, and swap to our new Kubernetes gaming architecture. We also piled a few other projects in there with all of that to eliminate even more technical debt.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

• 1
  Prove it. A multi-month proof of concept, led by Jason Sova, validated VergeOS against venue, data center, and automation requirements.
• 2
  Standardize it. One three-node VergeOS design on Dell PowerEdge became the template for every venue and the core data center.
• 3
  Repeat it. The team completed a full VxRail-to-VergeOS migration at a site in a single day, then rolled the same process across the country.

As of October 2026, 20 venues remained on VxRail, and Forehand expects Topgolf to complete the move by the second week of December 2026. Topgolf also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement with VergeIO.

Operational Control with Site Manager and Tenancy

Topgolf manages infrastructure at scale with VergeOS Site Manager and multi-tenant segmentation built on VergeOS Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology. A VDC is an isolated, resource-contained environment with its own compute, storage, networking, and policies, so each tenant behaves like an independent data center.

Topgolf aligns its VDC tenants to three U.S. time zones, East, Central, and West. That structure supports backup and DR workflows, staggered upgrades, and regional policy controls. Each tenant acts as a logical boundary for replication and operations, which simplifies scheduling and audit compliance.

Topgolf integrated VergeOS into its observability platform through native APIs and gained real-time visibility into site status, storage health, and replication state. With that automation in place, the operations team responds to anomalies proactively and keeps console sprawl to a minimum.

“We used to bounce between dozens of vCenter consoles. Now everything is centralized. It’s tenant-aware, API-driven, and fully auditable.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

Deployment and Upgrade Workflow

The migration process proved efficient and repeatable. In one example, the team completed a full VxRail-to-VergeOS migration in a single day. The next day it upgraded the VergeOS cluster during business hours, an operation that would have required a full maintenance window on the previous VxRail architecture. The upgrade produced no visible impact, even during active customer use.

Topgolf now upgrades the entire fleet in three weeks, with staggered rollouts by time zone. Platform upgrades used to take two to three months and required coordination with licensing changes and scheduled downtime.

“VergeOS upgrades barely drop a packet.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

Operational Automation: From Manual to Autonomous

Before VergeOS, a power loss at a venue meant 30 to 45 minutes of manual work to shut down workloads and bring them back up. Today VergeOS APIs drive the entire sequence. When power drops, a CI/CD pipeline starts a controlled shutdown that finishes in under 15 minutes. When power returns, the system validates the storage layers, restarts critical services, and posts a Slack notification for audit traceability.

“We spent 8 months trying to automate this on VxRail, and it failed to work reliably. With VergeOS, it took less than a month, and now it just works.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

Sites also boot at least 50 percent faster than they did on VxRail, with no wait for the storage layer to re-validate.

Built-In Protection: Eliminating Third-Party Backup

Topgolf originally planned to keep its existing data protection product, Rubrik. After extensive testing of the protection built into VergeOS, the team found that VergeOS met its operational and compliance requirements on its own. That discovery let Topgolf retire Rubrik, cutting cost and management overhead and simplifying operations. VergeOS protects against both accidental deletion and catastrophic failure with three integrated technologies.

Together, these capabilities give Topgolf full confidence that its infrastructure is performant, scalable, and resilient by design. For security operations, Topgolf pairs VergeOS snapshots with Veeam for threat hunting and ransomware protection.

“We didn’t plan to replace Rubrik. But after seeing how ioClone, ioGuardian, and ioReplicate work together, we realized VergeOS gave us everything we needed, without the added cost or complexity.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

Financial and Technical Results

Topgolf is realizing significant annualized savings from the move to VergeOS. “Moving to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent,” Forehand said. Software costs fell 77 percent. The savings come from several places at once: the elimination of legacy hypervisor licensing, commodity Dell PowerEdge servers in place of Dell VxRail, lower power, cooling, and floor space at each venue, evolving data protection and experience delivery strategies, and the staff time returned by automated upgrades and failover workflows.

The technical gains matter as much as the cost improvements. The simplified design and self-healing capabilities raise resiliency. Deduplication at the storage layer and freedom to choose hardware stretch every server further. Native backup and replication workflows include immutable, crash-consistent ioClone snapshots, policy-based replication to alternate sites or tenants, and isolated, tenant-based rollback for testing or restoration. API-controlled retention enforcement guards against accidental deletion, and a unified control plane scales from edge to core.

“During testing, I’ve purposely misconfigured clusters, and VergeOS still worked. That’s how intelligent and forgiving the platform is.”

Jason Sova, Architect for Enterprise Infrastructure, Topgolf

A New Standard for Infrastructure Partnership

Topgolf’s infrastructure team set out to find a platform that met current needs and opened the door to future innovation. VergeOS simplified operations, reduced cost, increased reliability, and positioned the company for AI-powered venue analytics. The team also found a partner committed to its success.

“Working with VergeIO has been the best partner experience of my career.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

“No other technology partner has been this responsive, this committed, or this aligned with our goals.”

Scott Forehand, Manager of Global Infrastructure, Topgolf

With VergeOS in place, Topgolf has turned a period of uncertainty into a platform for long-term growth, resilience, and differentiation, from the edge of every hitting bay to the core data center.