Alternative

Lancaster Central School District Replaces VMware with VergeIO

by

The move saves $150,000 annually and boosts IT efficiency

Ann Arbor, MI – February 18th, 2025 – Lancaster Central School District has successfully transitioned to VergeIO’s VergeOS, achieving $150,000 in annual cost savings while improving performance, data protection, and storage efficiency.

Prior to the transition, the district faced a substantial increase in licensing costs, creating budget concerns. Additionally, the previous solution fell short in storage efficiency, struggling with deduplication, snapshot performance, and resiliency. Lancaster’s IT team evaluated multiple virtualization solutions in search of a more cost-effective and high-performance alternative before selecting VergeIO’s integrated ultraconverged infrastructure platform.

“We needed a solution that wasn’t just a replacement for our existing virtualization platform, but an improvement. VergeIO delivered exactly that.”
– Eric Miller, Manager of Information Services, Lancaster Central School District

Challenges with Previous Virtualized SAN Solutions

Before transitioning, Lancaster encountered several issues with its previous virtualized SAN solution, including:

  • Rising capacity-based licensing costs, making budgeting unpredictable
  • Snapshot performance degradation, limiting recovery options
  • Inefficient deduplication, increasing storage requirements
  • Complex stretched cluster dependencies, leading to potential disruptions

Why Lancaster Chose VergeIO

After a thorough evaluation, VergeIO stood out as the preferred option due to its cost-effectiveness, storage integration, and ease of use. VergeIO directly integrates storage into the hypervisor, unlike other virtualization solutions, eliminating the need for external storage solutions.

Additional factors that influenced Lancaster’s decision included:

  • Superior support – VergeIO offers 100% US-based support with direct access to engineers
  • Inline global deduplication – VergeFS reduced storage consumption without performance penalties
  • Snapshot performance – VergeFS snapshots are instantaneous and impact-free, enabling more reliable backups and recovery
  • Resiliency improvements – Unlike Lancaster’s previous stretched clusters, VergeIO’s active-active deployment maintained uptime during ISP failures, ensuring seamless operations

“We wanted a system that did not require constant monitoring. VergeIO is so good at handling things behind the scenes that we can concentrate on improving and developing new solutions for our district leveraging the VergeIO platform.”
– Tim Johnson, Systems Administrator, Lancaster Central School District

Seamless Migration and Immediate Benefits

Lancaster deployed VergeIO in May 2024 as a proof of concept and completed its full transition to production workloads by November 2024. The move resulted in:

  • $150,000 in annual cost savings by eliminating substantial license fee increases
  • Simplified IT operations, allowing the team to focus on strategic projects
  • Improved storage efficiency with VergeFS’s global deduplication
  • Eliminated VMware’s performance bottlenecks, including snapshot and cluster dependency issues

“Lancaster Central School District’s move to VergeIO is a perfect example of how organizations can escape rising virtualization costs while improving operational efficiency. We look forward to supporting Lancaster’s journey and helping more organizations make the switch.”
– Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO

Comparing vSAN Alternatives: Free Expert Webinar

For IT professionals facing similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar featuring storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer George Crump.

This webinar will provide an in-depth comparison of VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, helping IT teams make informed decisions on cost, performance, and data resiliency.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
📧 Register: No forms, just reply to this email with “Yes”

🔗 Learn More and Register

About Lancaster Central School District

Lancaster Central School District serves the Lancaster, NY community, providing innovative educational programs and advanced technology solutions to enhance student learning. The district’s commitment to technology modernization ensures a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure that supports students, educators, and administrators.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization and the leading VMware alternative. Unlike traditional hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) collapses the virtualization, storage, and networking stack into an integrated data center operating environment, VergeOS. Its efficiency enables greater workload density using existing hardware while improving data resiliency. The result is dramatically lower costs, improved availability, and simplified IT operations.

For more information, visit www.verge.io.

Media Contact

Judy Smith, JPR Communications
📧 [email protected]
📞 818-522-9673

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

by

When evaluating the data protection capabilities of a vSAN alternative, understanding vSAN snapshots is as crucial as ensuring that it offers high performance and scalability. Although many vSAN solutions provide granular protection and recovery options, the ability to recover entire environments in one step—macro recovery—is equally significant. Without it, IT teams may struggle with hundreds of individual VM recoveries, resulting in excessive downtime and operational disruption.

Understanding vSAN Snapshot Limitations

The first step in understanding vSAN snapshots is learning what level of granularity they provide. Most vSAN platforms, such as VMware vSAN and Nutanix AOS Storage, operate at the virtual machine (VM) level concerning snapshots. In these environments, snapshots are generally managed per VM, allowing for the restoration of individual VMs and potentially even files when necessary.

Granular recovery is an essential operational feature—IT teams require the capability to recover a single deleted file or restore an application VM that was accidentally corrupted. However, when disaster strikes on a larger scale, such as:

  • A ransomware attack that encrypts workloads or dozens of VMs
  • A storage system failure affecting multiple VMs
  • A major misconfiguration or corruption event

IT teams must recover individual VMs and entire business units, departments, or data center environments. Unfortunately, neither VMware vSAN nor Nutanix AOS Storage offers macro recovery capabilities, forcing IT administrators to restore each VM individually, significantly extending downtime.

The granular structure of many vSAN alternative snapshots complicates protecting the entire environment. Although VMs can typically be grouped by “tag” for protection, the underlying software continues to operate per VM. It must manage dozens or even hundreds of individual snapshots per snapshot interval in the background.

VM-only granularity also makes it challenging to achieve consistent states across environments, not only among VMs but also in infrastructure-wide settings such as networking and other configurations. If these settings fall out of sync or go unrecorded, recovery becomes more challenging and prolongs the time needed to return to normal operations.

Lastly, VM-only granularity increases the load on metadata. Because executing a snapshot of a workload may lead to dozens of managed instances, metadata management becomes complex and bloated. This complexity is why most vSAN solutions limit the number of active snapshots per VM.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots Macro Protection Capabilities

Macro recovery allows IT teams to restore entire groups of workloads at once—whether it’s a collection of business units, dozens of branch offices, or a multi-tenant environment. Protecting and recovering these entities in a single movement is essential because it provides:

  1. Faster recovery from large-scale failures – Instead of recovering hundreds of VMs manually, macro recovery restores an entire encapsulated environment, including environmental settings, in one data-consistent step, significantly reducing downtime.
  2. Streamlined Metadata Management – Since one snapshot can now represent a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand VMs, metadata is much less burdensome on the operating environment. Macro snapshots enable IT to execute snapshots almost continuously without any impact on performance.
  3. Stronger ransomware protection – Cyberattacks don’t just target single VMs; they encrypt entire workloads. Macro recovery enables point-in-time restoration of entire environments, allowing organizations to roll back to a known good state within minutes.
  4. Multi-tenancy protection – In environments where multiple departments or customers operate on shared infrastructure, macro recovery ensures that a single tenant’s data can be restored without impacting others.
  5. Simplified Site Recovery — Macro data protection and recovery also tackle one of the key challenges organizations encounter during a site disaster: synchronizing infrastructure configuration data, network information, and hypervisor configuration settings with the data being replicated. Without macro protection, the recovery process is manual, hindering the effort and failing to meet recovery time objectives (RTO).

How VergeIO Enables Macro Protection

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

Understanding vSAN snapshots will help you realize the advantages of VergeIO’s approach. Unlike VMware vSAN and Nutanix, VergeIO’s VergeOS includes built-in macro recovery capabilities. With infrastructure-wide and Virtual Data Center (VDC) -level snapshots, IT teams can capture entire environments—not just individual VMs. These snapshots simultaneously capture all metadata and configuration information alongside the data, ensuring consistency. As a result, VergeOS can restore the entire infrastructure or a complete workload in a single operation.

Granularity isn’t sacrificed for VergeOS’s macro recoverability. IT can drill into an instance-wide or VDC snapshot and extract an individual VM for recovery. Individual VM snapshots can be mounted as drives to the production version of the VM, enabling single-file recovery simply by copying data between drives.

At the same time, VergeOS can snapshot at the VM level, but with VergeOS, VM-level snapshots are the exception, not the rule. A VM-level snapshot can be executed for special situations where a VM needs extra protection or longer retention times.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

VergeFS snapshots are remarkably efficient, allowing frequent snapshots without compromising performance. High frequency without any performance impact ensures that organizations can always revert to a recent, clean state, whether recovering from a ransomware attack, a catastrophic failure, or retrieving a document that a user accidentally overwrote just 15 minutes prior.

Get Macro Protection, Move Beyond VM-Only Granularity

Granular recovery is essential, but macro recovery is a powerful complement when minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. If you’re evaluating vSAN alternatives, ensure the solutions you consider can restore entire environments quickly and efficiently—not just individual files or VMs. Check out this VMware Alternative data protection checklist.

Understanding vSAN Snapshots: Free Expert Webinar

For IT professionals encountering similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar with storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s Chief Marketing Officer, George Crump.

This webinar will comprehensively compare VMware vSAN, Nutanix AOS Storage, and VergeIO VergeFS, assisting IT teams in making informed decisions regarding cost, performance, and data resilience.

Webinar Details

📅 Date: February 19, 2024
⏰ Time: 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

🔗 Learn More & Register

A Double-Protected VMware Alternative

by

A double-protected VMware alternative allows organizations to lower licensing expenses and enhance their data resilience. With the rise of infrastructure threats and the need for continuity of operations, IT should leverage this infrastructure shift to boost its recovery capabilities from accidental file deletions, server or drive failures, site disasters, and long-term data retention needs.

A robust VMware alternative must provide two layers of protection: real-time infrastructure resilience and long-term data protection. VergeIO and Storware work together to create a double-protected solution, combining real-time safeguards like ioGuardian, ioClone (snapshots), and ioReplicate with long-term retention and archival capabilities provided by Storware Backup and Recovery.

This approach delivers the strongest data protection strategy and allows IT teams to leverage existing server and backup storage hardware, reducing costs and eliminating the need for rip-and-replace upgrades.

First Layer of Protection: Built-in Infrastructure Resiliency

Many VMware alternatives rely heavily on third-party backup solutions for protection, leaving gaps in immediate recovery and real-time failure resilience. A double-protected VMware alternative must first integrate infrastructure-native data protection that ensures data availability without relying on backups for everyday failures.

ioGuardian: Continuous Failure Detection and Recovery

The foundation of VergeIO’s built-in resiliency is ioGuardian, which proactively monitors infrastructure health and automatically reroutes workloads in the event of drive or node failures. Unlike traditional instant-recovery solutions that require IT intervention, ioGuardian provides real-time, automated protection that keeps applications running without delays or downtime. It also protects against multiple simultaneous drive failures, ensuring data remains accessible even in worst-case scenarios.

ioClone: Instant, Space-Efficient Snapshots

Snapshots are a critical component of an effective data resilience strategy, but most legacy HCI and VMware solutions create performance bottlenecks when snapshots accumulate. VergeIO’s ioClone snapshots eliminate this issue by providing instant, space-efficient, performance-neutral snapshots that IT can use to recover from accidental deletions and system corruption quickly. Snapshots can even be used to recover from ransomware attacks because they are read-only from inception.

ioReplicate: Multi-Site Data Resiliency

VergeIO offers ioReplicate, an efficient, WAN-optimized replication engine that enables real-time or scheduled replication to offsite locations for organizations needing geo-redundancy. This ensures that even in the event of a primary site failure, IT teams can rapidly failover and restore operations from a secondary location.

Global Inline Deduplication

VergeOS features integrated global inline deduplication, the foundation for both ioClone and ioReplicate. This technology decreases storage consumption by ensuring that unique data blocks are written, greatly enhancing efficiency. Removing redundant data globally improves storage performance and maximizes available capacity, making snapshots and replication operations even more cost-effective.

Second Layer of Protection: Long-Term Data Retention

A double-protected VMware alternative requires more than built-in resiliency and data availability in real-time. IT teams also need a long-term data protection strategy to defend against data corruption, cyber threats, and to meet compliance requirements.

Storware Backup and Recovery: Deep Integration with VergeIO

Storware extends VergeIO’s protection by offering long-term backup retention, compliance archiving, and multi-destination backup support, allowing organizations to meet regulatory and business continuity requirements. Unlike traditional backup solutions, Storware is directly integrated into VergeOS, enabling seamless backup of ioClone snapshots and leveraging VergeIO’s changed block tracking (CBT) for faster, storage-efficient backups.

To learn more about VergeIO’s and Storware’s Double Protection and to see it in action, watch our on-demand webinar, “Exit VMware, Retain Server and Backup Hardware.”

Use Existing Server and Backup Storage Hardware

VergeOS enhances flexibility by supporting a broad range of existing server hardware. With its intelligent resource allocation and ability to run on nearly any x86 hardware purchased in the last six years, IT teams can continue using their current infrastructure instead of refreshing everything simultaneously.

One of the most costly aspects of transitioning off of VMware is replacing backup infrastructure due to compatibility limitations with new platforms. Storware removes this concern by supporting a wide range of backup storage hardware, including:

  • Existing NAS/SAN backup storage
  • Object storage (on-prem and cloud-based)
  • Backup appliances from vendors like Rubrik, ExaGrid, and Dell EMC

Storware: Keep Your Existing Backup Storage

Storware enables IT teams to continue using their existing backup storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to purchase new backup appliances. Whether organizations rely on on-premises storage or cloud-based repositories, Storware provides seamless backup and archival capabilities. This flexibility helps businesses reduce costs while ensuring backup operations remain efficient and secure.

ioOptimize: Extending Hardware Lifespan

VergeOS includes ioOptimize, a technology designed to maximize the efficiency of existing hardware. By intelligently distributing workloads, optimizing storage, and reducing system overhead, ioOptimize allows organizations to extend the life of their current infrastructure while also improving performance. IT teams can repurpose aging servers and storage systems rather than retiring them early, ultimately reducing costs and making infrastructure refresh cycles more flexible.

The Most Data-Resilient VMware Alternative

VergeIO believes that data protection and resiliency is a shared responsibility. The combination of VergeIO and Storware creates the most resilient VMware alternative, delivering:

  • Real-time failure detection and recovery with ioGuardian
  • Instant, space-efficient snapshots with ioClone
  • Multi-site data replication with ioReplicate
  • Fast, storage-efficient backups with Storware’s CBT integration
  • Long-term retention and archival capabilities using existing backup storage hardware
  • Extended server lifecycle with ioOptimize

With VergeIO’s built-in resilience and Storware’s long-term data protection, IT teams can confidently transition from VMware without sacrificing security, availability, or infrastructure flexibility.

Conclusion

A VMware exit should not come at the cost of data protection or hardware flexibility. VergeIO and Storware provide a double-protected VMware alternative that delivers real-time resilience and long-term security, ensuring IT teams reduce costs, enhance uptime, and retain control over their infrastructure.

Organizations looking to exit VMware now have a cost-effective, highly available, and deeply resilient alternative that protects both today and into the future.

InterBel Telephone Achieves Seamless Infrastructure Refresh with VergeIO, Cutting Costs by Nearly 45%

by

For Immediate Release

Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tuesday, January 7th — VergeIO, a leader in ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI), is proud to announce that InterBel Telephone, a trusted telecommunications provider in northwest Montana, has successfully modernized its IT infrastructure with VergeIO’s groundbreaking platform. This transformative upgrade streamlined operations and came in significantly under budget, saving nearly 45% compared to revised projections.

Faced with aging infrastructure and skyrocketing software licensing fees, InterBel sought a flexible, cost-effective solution to replace its Cisco UCS and NetApp environment. With hardware reaching end-of-life and escalating costs from traditional virtualization platforms such as VMware, the telecom provider needed a modern solution to ensure reliable, efficient customer service.

Tom Rasmussen, Manager of Information Technology at InterBel Telephone, explained, “The Broadcom acquisition of VMware hit us hard, with licensing costs jumping by 30%. It was a punch in the gut. VergeIO stood out with its simplicity, flexibility, and ability to run on the hardware we already trusted.”

The project was built on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers, leveraging VergeIO’s VergeOS platform—a powerful ultraconverged infrastructure solution—for an all-flash production environment. Another node was configured using VergeIO’s ioGuardian feature for disaster recovery, providing a robust backup and failover solution that can mix SSD and hard disk drives seamlessly. This configuration maximized performance while ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency for the future.

Rasmussen highlighted the straightforward implementation process: “VergeIO was like reading an open book. It took under two hours to deploy in our lab, and adding nodes was seamless. Compared to the complexity of Cisco UCS and NetApp, VergeIO made the process remarkably simple.”

The VergeIO deployment delivered immediate benefits, including:

  • Cost Savings: Instead of exceeding their budget by 30% with VMware, InterBel completed the project using VergeIO at just 28% of their original budget—achieving an impressive 45% savings compared to VMware.
  • Performance Improvements: An all-flash environment enhanced speed and reliability beyond what the legacy systems could offer.
  • Streamlined Management: A single-pane-of-glass interface simplified operations for InterBel’s one-person IT team.
  • Scalability: VergeOS allowed the addition of compute-only nodes and flexible storage options for future growth.

Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO, commented, “We are thrilled to support InterBel in achieving their infrastructure goals. Our ultraconverged platform is designed to simplify IT operations and deliver exceptional value, enabling organizations like InterBel to focus on delivering superior services to their customers.”

Today, InterBel is poised for continued growth and operational excellence. VergeIO’s UCI ensures that their IT environment remains scalable, cost-effective, and ready to meet the evolving demands of their telecom services.

About VergeIO

VergeIO delivers the future of virtualization via an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) solution that collapses the entire IT stack—virtualization, storage, and networking—into a single platform, VergeOS. This approach improves efficiency, enhances data resiliency, and reduces costs while simplifying IT operations. VergeIO empowers organizations to achieve unmatched scalability and performance.

About InterBel Telephone

Founded in 1962, InterBel Telephone is a telecommunications cooperative dedicated to providing advanced connectivity solutions to the communities of northwest Montana. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and a community-focused approach, InterBel continues to deliver high-quality service and innovative solutions to its customers.

Media Contact

Judy Smith
JPR
[email protected]
818-522-9673

For more information about VergeIO and its solutions, visit www.verge.io.
For more information about InterBel Telephone, visit www.interbel.com.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons

by

Enterprise VMware alternative lessons drawn from service providers like NETdepot—who recently transitioned from VMware to VergeIO—offer valuable insights that enterprises can apply to their data centers. In today’s environment, finding a suitable VMware alternative can be challenging, especially for enterprises looking to gain cost savings, flexibility, and improved support. By observing NETdepot’s successful migration, enterprise data centers can better understand how to address common VMware pain points and achieve an infrastructure that aligns with long-term goals.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons from NETdepot’s Transition

1. Simplified Licensing and Hardware Flexibility

For many organizations, VMware’s per-core licensing structure presents significant challenges. This model limits hardware choices, dictating processor configurations based on licensing costs rather than performance needs. The per-core structure can quickly escalate costs as enterprises adopt higher-core processors to meet increased workloads. NETdepot found that VergeIO’s per-server pricing model provided much-needed flexibility, allowing them to select hardware based on performance requirements instead of adjusting for licensing constraints.

Additionally, enterprises should be aware of the hidden costs that can accumulate under per-core licensing. These hidden costs are overlooked initially but can lead to significant budget overruns as organizations scale their infrastructure.

By choosing a VMware alternative like VergeIO, which avoids these licensing complexities, enterprises can make cost-effective hardware decisions that allow longer equipment lifespans and invest in more dense server configurations without fear of rising per-core expenses.

2. Streamlined Migration Process

Moving from VMware can seem daunting, but NETdepot’s migration experience was seamless thanks to VergeIO’s built-in VMware migration service, which allowed for rapid VM transitions with almost no downtime. One of the enterprise VMware alternative lessons is considering platforms that offer simple migration paths, helping them minimize disruptions and maintain service continuity.

3. Integrated Networking and Security

With VergeIO’s built-in routing and firewall capabilities, NETdepot was able to reduce reliance on additional appliances and VMs, lowering costs and streamlining operations. A VMware alternative with integrated Layer 2/3 networking functions for enterprise data centers can enhance security and simplify network management.

4. Strong Data Protection and Resiliency

VergeIO’s ioGuardian feature provides NETdepot with robust protection against hardware failures, adding another layer of resiliency. Enterprises should prioritize alternatives that offer integrated data protection features, enabling seamless recovery and ensuring continued operations even during unexpected events.

5. Responsive, High-Quality Support

For NETdepot, fast, reliable support was crucial. VergeIO’s responsive support team helped NETdepot avoid lengthy downtime and quickly resolved critical issues. Another of the enterprise VMware alternative lessons is to prioritize support quality and responsiveness when evaluating VMware alternatives to ensure seamless day-to-day operations.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons: VergeIO is a Solution that Delivers Value, Stability, and Security

For NETdepot, VergeIO provided a combination of features and support that addressed their concerns with VMware. The move to VergeIO helped NETdepot reduce costs, improve service quality, and enhance security. As enterprises explore VMware alternatives, NETdepot’s experience illustrates the importance of choosing a platform that integrates well with existing processes, provides a straightforward migration experience, and offers operational efficiencies that benefit both the data center and end users.

NETdepot’s Key Benefits with VergeIO:

enterprise VMware alternative lessons
  • Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Transparent pricing and licensing flexibility enable NETdepot to make cost-effective hardware choices.
  • Enhanced Performance and Stability: A stable and resilient platform that avoids the performance pitfalls of legacy solutions like vSAN.
  • Integrated Security and Networking: Built-in Layer 2/3 networking capabilities streamline network operations, reduce appliance requirements, and enhance security.
  • Rapid, High-Quality Support: VergeIO’s support team provides NETdepot with responsive, mission-critical support, ensuring they can resolve issues quickly.
  • Data Protection and Recovery: VergeIO’s ioGuardian offers resilient data protection, keeping NETdepot’s customers secure and operational in the face of hardware failures.

Want to learn more? Access the detailed NETdepot case study and other recent VergeIO customer success stories. Register for access to all of our case studies.

Enterprise VMware Alternative Lessons: Leveraging Service Providers

NETdepot’s transition to VergeIO illustrates that service providers not only adopt powerful VMware alternatives but can offer a valuable extension of enterprise IT. By leveraging organizations like NETdepot, enterprises can address compute or storage demand spikes, facilitate disaster recovery, and offload infrastructure management to a trusted partner. This approach provides enterprises with additional capacity and increases their resiliency to unexpected events.

Join our webinar on November 14th to hear directly from NETdepot’s VP of Solutions Architecture, Ben Beasley, about the transition process and benefits of using VergeIO. Register Here to see how NETdepot’s experience can inform your VMware exit strategy.

Eliminate Server Refreshes

by

Many organizations are searching for ways to eliminate server refreshes and stretch the lifespan of their IT infrastructure.—essentially replace only what’s necessary, when it’s necessary. A benefit of this approach is the reduction in e-waste.

Eliminate Server Refreshes

Server refreshes are often seen as unavoidable, driven by technological advances that lead IT teams to replace aging servers with new models. Software companies force upgrades by decommissioning older servers even if they are still useful. VergeIO’s ioOptimize makes the elimination of server refreshes achievable. By balancing workloads across servers of different generations, ioOptimize enables organizations to keep older hardware running as long as it’s operational, integrating new servers gradually and avoiding disruptive, costly refreshes.

Extending the Life of Existing Servers

An obvious way to eliminate server refreshes is to extend the life of existing servers. Traditional infrastructure software often fails to effectively leverage older servers alongside new, more advanced hardware, turning aging machines into liabilities as they struggle to handle modern workloads. VergeOS’s efficiency and low overhead breathe new life into aging server hardware. With ioOptimize, these older servers can safely serve valuable roles within the infrastructure as long as they remain functional.

To help eliminate server refreshes, ioOptimize uses machine learning (ML) and narrow artificial intelligence (AI) to allocate workloads and resources across mixed-generation environments. By continuously monitoring each server’s health, capacity, and performance, ioOptimize ensures that even aging servers are utilized optimally without compromising stability. If an older server shows signs of potential failure, ioOptimize can migrate workloads to healthier servers, maintaining uptime without immediate replacements.

This approach enables companies to extend their hardware investments, deferring the need for new hardware until absolutely necessary, ultimately reducing costs and increasing return on investment.

Eliminate Server Refreshes by Balancing Workloads

Integrating powerful new servers into an environment with aging hardware can create workload-balancing challenges. Traditional virtualization and management software often struggle to distribute workloads across servers with varying performance capabilities effectively.

ioOptimize resolves this challenge by balancing workloads across servers, taking advantage of older and newer resources. ML algorithms within ioOptimize assess each server’s unique characteristics—such as processing power, storage capacity, and network speed—distributing tasks accordingly. This allows IT to eliminate server refreshes by assigning older servers to handle lighter workloads. In contrast, more demanding tasks are assigned to newer hardware, optimizing the efficiency of the entire infrastructure.

For a more detailed understanding of how ioOptimize enables seamless integration of aging hardware and newer servers, access VergeIO’s white paper on ioOptimize. This comprehensive guide explains how ioOptimize supports extended hardware lifecycles and introduces VergeIO’s per-server licensing model, which offers a cost-effective alternative to restrictive per-core licenses. Additionally, it covers ioOptimize’s automated “scale-down” feature, which helps reduce data center footprints by consolidating servers, saving on power, cooling, and space.

Seamlessly Integrating New Hardware

One of the key advantages of ioOptimize is its ability to integrate new servers into existing environments easily. When new hardware is added, ioOptimize’s intelligent algorithms detect and adjust to the capabilities of the new servers, leveraging these resources to improve performance.

For example, if new servers offer enhanced network capabilities or increased processing power, ioOptimize automatically incorporates these upgrades into its workload distribution, maximizing efficiency without the need for manual reconfiguration. This process minimizes downtime, allowing the data center to evolve smoothly over time instead of undergoing disruptive overhauls.

Eliminate Server Refreshes with Incremental Upgrades

ioOptimize allows older servers to operate alongside new hardware, supporting a continuous, incremental upgrade strategy. Instead of undergoing frequent, large-scale hardware replacements, organizations can introduce new servers as needed, reducing both capital expenditures and the operational impact of major upgrades.

With ioOptimize, IT teams can manage server refreshes at their own pace based on specific operational needs and budget considerations. Older hardware can continue in use until fully depreciated, while new servers are added to the infrastructure gradually. This approach reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO)erm and eliminates the financial strain of routine refresh cycles. Instead of IT having to deal with the hidden costs of per core models, VergeIO’s licensing model is per server. It doesn’t punish customers for buying fewer quad-processor servers than dual over the long processor servers. Also, ioOptimize can automate the shrinking of a VergeOS instance in case you want to move to fewer, more powerful servers.

Eliminate Server Refreshes for A Sustainable IT Infrastructure

As sustainability becomes a priority, reducing hardware waste is increasingly important. ioOptimize maximizes the useful life of each server, contributing directly to sustainability goals. Extending the lifespan of aging servers not only saves on costs but also reduces e-waste and environmental impact.

For more on how virtualization strategies like ioOptimize can support sustainable, high-performance data centers, register for VergeIO’s on-demand webinar, “Can Virtualization Enhance Sustainability?” Hosted by TruthInIT, this webinar includes insights from VergeIO experts and SmallWorldBigData analysts on extending server life, adopting energy-efficient hardware, and building sustainable IT operations.

Efficient resource management and gradual upgrades with ioOptimize can lower power usage, reduce cooling demands, and minimize environmental impact, all while meeting performance needs and budget constraints.

Server and data availability is another criticla requirment to safely leverage aging server hardware. VergeOS these capabilities built in. Watch our on-demand demsonstration to see these capabilites in action.

Conclusion

ioOptimize presents a practical solution to the limitations of traditional server refresh cycles. By balancing workloads across mixed-generation hardware and integrating new servers seamlessly, ioOptimize eliminates the need for disruptive refreshes. Organizations can extend the life of their existing hardware, reduce capital costs, and meet sustainability goals by using a gradual, incremental upgrade strategy.

If you’re looking to maximize the value of your hardware investments and build a sustainable, scalable infrastructure, ioOptimize can help. Learn more about how ioOptimize supports extended hardware life and enhanced efficiency on our ioOptimize landing page.