On-Demand Webinar · Recorded Thursday, August 20, 2026
The Software-Defined Answer to Hardware Inflation
Storage prices reset in four months and stayed there. Research from Omdia (formerly ESG) shows what 400 IT buyers decided to do about it, and the session closes with the architecture that answers it running live.
Your Presenters
What the Session Covered
Research, then a standard, then a running system
The hour ran in that order on purpose. An analyst presented what the market decided, VergeIO turned that into criteria a buyer carries into any vendor conversation, and the last segment tested those criteria against a live environment rather than a slide. Anyone holding a renewal date or a quote that expires this quarter should start at the second segment.
What 400 Buyers Decided
Simon Robinson presents the Omdia study on how enterprises are responding to storage inflation, and which technologies they plan to buy.
Inflation, Not a Shortage
Why record supply and record margins point at a repricing that holds, and what the supply side is doing about it.
Three Questions to Ask
The standard that separates software-defined storage platforms that survive an inflation from the ones that tolerate it.
High Availability in Software
Dave Vincent runs a node failure against a live VergeOS environment, so running hotter stays a defensible plan.
Storage Migration Across Media
A running workload moves between media types and hardware generations without a maintenance window.
Questions From the Floor
Open questions to an analyst and two practitioners, covering renewal timing, mixed hardware, and utilization headroom.
Take the research with you
Both documents behind the session are open. Neither one asks for a form.
Is Software-Defined Storage the Answer to Hardware Inflation?
The long version of the middle segment. The paper works through why buyers ranked software-defined storage first, where most implementations stop short of the problem, and what a platform has to absorb to hold a budget through three cycles of higher component prices.
Read the White PaperThe research Simon Robinson presented
Omdia surveyed 400 North American IT professionals with storage and infrastructure responsibility, fielded in May 2026, with 76 percent at senior management level or above. Every respondent had already absorbed the price increases, so the study measures what affected organizations are doing about it.
Get the Omdia ReportRelated Resources
The rest of the storage squeeze material
Omdia Study: 98 Percent of Enterprises Are Consolidating Infrastructure
The announcement of the commissioned research, with the headline findings and the analyst commentary that came with them.
StorageSwissRising Cloud Costs: The Case for Owning Hardware in 2026
Public cloud capacity went to the AI build-out first. What that does to the escape hatch enterprises assumed they still had.
VergeIO BlogStorage Tiering Without the Capacity Tax
Tiering was never an array feature. It was a placement decision that lived in the array, and moving the intelligence changes what the tiers cost.
Case StudySaratoga Casino Holdings
What consolidating storage, virtualization, and data protection into one code base did to a real refresh cycle and a real budget.
Next StepSchedule a Technical Demo
Bring your renewal date and your most recent storage quote. An engineer runs the same environment Dave used, against your numbers.