Live Webinar · Thursday, August 20, 2026
The Software-Defined Answer to Hardware Inflation
Storage prices reset in four months and stayed there. New research from Omdia (formerly ESG) shows what 400 IT buyers decided to do about it, and this session ends with the architecture that answers it running live.
Your Presenters
Session Agenda
Research, then a standard, then a running system
The hour moves in that order on purpose. An analyst presents what the market decided, VergeIO turns it into criteria you can take into any vendor conversation, and the last segment tests those criteria against a live environment.
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.
Bring Your Last Quote
Open questions to an analyst and two practitioners. Bring your renewal date and your most recent storage quote.
Who Should Attend
Built for teams already evaluating software-defined storage
This session is written for infrastructure architects, storage leads, and IT directors who have already concluded that decoupling storage software from storage hardware is the durable answer to a hardware supply crisis. Choosing the category is the easy half of that decision. Knowing what to demand of an implementation is the half that decides whether the next three budget cycles work.
Anyone holding a renewal date, a refresh plan, or a quote that expires in thirty days will find the second half of the hour immediately useful.
About the Research
The Omdia study
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 qualified by already absorbing the price increases, so the study measures what affected organizations are doing rather than how many are affected. Among technologies they are not currently using, they ranked software-defined storage first for significant investment as a direct response to the storage and memory shortage, ahead of all-flash, hybrid, object, and every other array architecture on the list.
Simon Robinson, Chief Analyst for Storage and Data Infrastructure at Omdia, conducted the research and opens this session with it. VergeIO commissioned the study and gets the same twenty minutes of findings the rest of the market will read.
Every attendee receives a copy of the Omdia report. Registering puts the full study in your hands whether or not you make the live session.
About VergeOS
Software-defined storage with the rest of the stack inside it
VergeOS is a private cloud operating system in which storage, virtualization, networking, and data protection share one code base. Global inline deduplication runs across the entire pool rather than per volume, which raises the effective capacity of the drives you already own. The platform runs mixed media and mixed hardware generations in the same environment, so procurement buys whatever is available in the quarter it is needed.
Backup and disaster recovery run inside that same environment as primary workloads, which removes a second set of arrays from the plan. Seventy-four percent of the buyers Omdia surveyed said integrating data protection with primary storage to cut hardware footprint is what they are already trying to do.