Flash prices have climbed for most of 2026, and nearly every HCI platform sold today still puts every terabyte on flash. That turns each refresh into a bill for the most inflated component in the data center. A 24 TB hard drive costs about $56 per terabyte against $706 for a 15.36 TB NVMe SSD, and most of what sits on flash, file shares, templates, backups, cold data and aging VMs, barely moves. This campaign asks whether HCI and hard drives together can push back. VergeOS lets IT place each VM drive on the tier it actually needs and move it live when the business changes. The resources below walk through the math, the architecture and the live demos.
Solution Content
How to Use HCI and Hard Drives to Fight Data Center Inflation
George Crump and Dave Vincent move a running VM from flash to hard drives and back, then walk through the refresh math for a real cluster. Every demo included, no registration required.
Watch On-Demand →How to Use HCI and Hard Drives to Fight Data Center Inflation
The full slide deck from the live session: flash versus hard drive pricing, the I/O patterns that decide placement, and how VergeOS moves workloads between tiers.
View the Presentation →Storage Refresh vs. Storage Inflation
Why your next storage refresh should replace the array and exit VMware in one project, using off-the-shelf flash, less of it, and hard drives for everything else.
View the Datasheet →Move a Live SQL Server Disk from Flash to Hard Drives
A short walkthrough of moving a running SQL Server drive from Tier 1 NVMe to hard drives with one Preferred Tier change and no downtime.
Watch the Video →We Moved a Live SQL Workload from NVMe to Spinning Disk
Dave Vincent runs the move on a live SQL Server workload in the lab and shows the numbers before and after.
Watch the Video →VergeIO Blogs
Could a 24 TB Hard Drive Replace a $10,000 SSD?
Flash now costs 12 to 14 times more per terabyte than a hard drive. What that gap does to an HCI refresh, and how VergeOS makes a hard drive tier keep up.
Read the Post →Can HCI Run a Database Application on Hard Disk Drives?
A database VM is five workloads in one box. Moving one SQL Server data drive to hard drives, live, cuts that VM’s storage media cost from $263 to $133.
Read the Post →How to Use Hard Drive Tiering to Fight Data Center Inflation
Our webinar recap. Pick the tier for each virtual drive, move it live, and pull it back to flash the moment a workload complains. Across a 150 TB estate, that is $97,500 less in raw media.
Read the Post →Industry Articles
Hybrid Storage Failed Once. Will It Fail Again?
Why the first generation of hybrid arrays let IT teams down, and what has to be different this time for flash and hard drives to share a platform.
Read the Article →More to Come
A second StorageSwiss article and a VMblog contributed article are on the way. Each one appears here as it publishes.