dataprotection

St. Clair County RESA Modernizes Infrastructure with VergeIO, Eliminates VMware and Veeam

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For Immediate Release

Ann Arbor, MI – July 8th, 2025 – St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA), which provides centralized IT services for five school districts, a local community college, and seven municipalities in Michigan, has successfully modernized its infrastructure by replacing VMware and Veeam with VergeIO’s software-defined infrastructure platform, VergeOS.

Faced with mounting costs, hardware limitations, and industry disruptions, RESA initiated a complete reevaluation of its IT environment. “We were hit with a one-two-three punch,” said James Marsack, Senior Network Engineer at RESA. “First, NetApp announced the end-of-life for our SolidFire array. Then Broadcom acquired VMware and froze all updates while raising prices. Finally, our Cisco UCS environment brought supply chain delays and massive hardware maintenance costs. We needed more than a patch—we needed an infrastructure rethink.”

RESA found its answer in VergeOS, a single software platform that combines virtualization, storage, and networking with built-in backup and disaster recovery. Introduced to VergeIO through Cambridge Computer, Marsack said, “VergeOS didn’t just preserve what we relied on—it expanded it. It allowed us to simplify management, reduce licensing costs, and improve performance. And it just works.”

Key Results:

  • High-Efficiency Storage: VergeOS’ VSAN with global inline deduplication achieved a 16:1 efficiency ratio, compared to 3.7:1 with SolidFire.
  • Backup and DR Simplified: Replaced a half-rack QNAP array and Veeam with VergeOS’ integrated snapshot and replication system.
  • Hourly Snapshots: Eliminated daily backup windows and increased resiliency with hourly, space-efficient snapshots and transparent recovery via ioGuardian.
  • Secure Self-Service: VergeOS’ secure, multi-tenant architecture empowered districts and municipalities with self-service capabilities, dramatically lowering operational overhead.

“Veeam jobs failed regularly. With VergeOS, we get hourly snapshots, instant rollback, and reliable replication—no third-party dependencies,” said Marsack.

RESA also improved security and control. “VergeOS’ tenanting system is elegant—brilliant, even. With SSO and two-factor authentication, it’s vastly more secure than VMware,” Marsack added. “Now, our customers can manage their own VMs, which reduces our management burden and increases their satisfaction.”

Marsack credited Cambridge Computer for facilitating the transformation. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it wasn’t for Cambridge. They introduced us to VergeIO, and it changed everything.”

Click here to read the in-depth Case Study about St. Clair RESA’s journey to VergeOS.

VergeIO will be hosting a webinar on July 17th at 1:00 PM ET, featuring RESA.  Click here to register.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative, providing a unified data center operating system that converges virtualization, storage, networking, and backup into a single piece of software. VergeOS simplifies IT operations, reduces costs, and enables rapid infrastructure deployment on new or repurposed hardware. For more information, visit www.verge.io.

About St. Clair County RESA

St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA) is one of Michigan’s 56 intermediate school districts. It provides centralized IT, administrative, and instructional services to five local K-12 school districts, a community college, and multiple municipal entities across the region. RESA’s mission is to deliver cost-effective, high-quality solutions that empower its educational and civic partners to serve their communities more effectively.

Media Contact:
Judy Smith
JPR for VergeIO
[email protected]
(818) 522-9673

Ensuring VDI Resilience

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Why Your Infrastructure Must Be More Reliable Than a Laptop

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) promises centralized management, enhanced security, and simplified desktop provisioning, but ensuring VDI resilience ultimately determines its success. Users expect their virtual desktops to be available whenever needed, and IT administrators can’t afford downtime. The last thing an IT team wants to hear is that a user’s personal laptop is more reliable than the VDI environment!

📺 Want to see how a resilient VDI infrastructure works in the real world? Watch our on-demand webinar featuring VergeIO, Inuvika, and Kelley Allen from CCSI demonstrating the solution in his production environment.
Register here.

To prevent this, organizations must deploy a highly resilient VDI architecture that can withstand hardware failures, ensure uninterrupted access, and protect against data loss. While solving performance issues like boot storms is essential, its potential performance doesn’t matter if the infrastructure is down. Ensuring VDI Resilience means choosing an infrastructure that can handle node failures, multiple simultaneous drive failures, and even full-site disruptions without impacting end-user availability.

The Cost of Downtime in VDI

When a user’s local laptop fails, one user is down. However, if a VDI system fails, hundreds or thousands of users can be left without access to their desktops and applications, bringing productivity to a standstill.

Downtime in a VDI environment results in:

  • Lost productivity – Employees, students, or healthcare professionals can’t access their critical applications.
  • IT scrambling to recover – Administrators are forced into emergency troubleshooting and system restores.
  • Potential data loss – Critical work may be lost if desktops or application servers aren’t adequately protected.
  • User frustration and resistance – If VDI is unreliable, users may abandon it in favor of personal devices, undermining IT security and control.

To prevent these issues, a truly resilient VDI platform must deliver continuous availability and data protection.

The Challenges Ensuring VDI Resilience

Traditional virtualization platforms often rely on RAID-based storage protection and compute clustering to maintain uptime. While these methods provide some level of redundancy, they have critical weaknesses:

  • RAID can’t handle multiple simultaneous drive failures – If two or more drives fail simultaneously in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array, data loss occurs, leading to a time-consuming and costly recovery process.
  • Compute clustering requires rebalancing workloads – In a node failure, traditional clusters must migrate VDI sessions to remaining nodes, often causing performance degradation or session disconnects.
  • Long rebuild times and performance loss – If a RAID array or vSAN-based storage system loses a drive, the rebuild process can take hours or even days, significantly slowing performance during that time.

For a VDI environment to be considered truly resilient, it must go beyond these traditional methods and offer:

  • Self-healing storage that can survive multiple drive failures.
  • Multi-node redundancy that intelligently shifts workloads without performance loss.
  • Built-in high availability that prevents downtime without complex manual intervention.

Ensuring VDI Resilience with a Distributed, Resilient Architecture

Ensuring VDI Resilience

A highly resilient VDI infrastructure must eliminate single points of failure and distribute resources across nodes to ensure seamless operation even during hardware failures.

A next-generation VDI platform should incorporate:

  • Distributed storage mirroring: Instead of relying on RAID, data should be mirrored across multiple nodes, allowing desktops and applications to remain accessible without the prolonged performance impact of a RAID rebuild.
  • Automated failover: If a compute node fails, virtual desktops should intelligently shift to another node, which is most qualified to host them, without user disruption or IT intervention.
  • Per-VM and per-disk fault tolerance: Protecting individual VDI sessions and applications at a granular level ensures that even partial infrastructure failures don’t impact the entire environment.
  • Self-healing capabilities: The system should automatically rebalance data and workloads in the background, reducing IT workload and recovery times.

VergeOS: Ensuring VDI Resilience Without Complexity

VergeOS is designed to deliver a highly resilient VDI infrastructure by integrating virtualization, storage, and networking into a single, fault-tolerant platform. Unlike traditional virtualization platforms that rely on RAID-based storage or software-defined storage layers that introduce bottlenecks, VergeOS provides:

  • Multi-node fault tolerance: If a node fails, workloads are intelligently transferred to another node without performance degradation.
  • Distributed mirroring instead of RAID: Data is mirrored across multiple storage devices, ensuring production performance without RAID-rebuild overhead.
  • Cluster Hot Spare: VergeOS’ ioGuardian protects from multiple simultaneous drive or server failures, providing data to impacted virtual desktops inline without interruption.
  • No dependency on external storage: Traditional SAN or NAS solutions introduce single points of failure. VergeOS eliminates this risk by making storage an integrated, distributed component of the virtualization platform while providing superior performance.
  • Automatic recovery and rebalancing: The system self-heals by redistributing workloads, reducing administrative overhead.

With VergeOS, IT teams can ensure that VDI infrastructure is always more reliable than a user’s laptop, providing uninterrupted access even in the face of hardware failures.

Ensuring VDI Resilience from Data Center Disaster

Beyond local resilience, organizations must also prepare for full-site outages caused by natural disasters, power failures, or regional disruptions. A robust VDI strategy includes protecting users from node and drive failures and ensuring that the entire desktop environment can fail over to a secondary location with minimal disruption.

VergeOS addresses this challenge by integrating VergeFabric, a built-in software-defined networking layer that supports advanced routing protocols such as BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). When combined with VergeOS’s native replication capabilities, this allows organizations to replicate virtual desktops and application workloads between primary and secondary sites securely and efficiently. Routing can automatically shift users to the secondary location in a disaster without requiring manual reconfiguration.

This level of integration ensures that VDI environments are protected at the hardware and cluster level and resilient across geographic regions. Users can continue accessing their virtual desktops from anywhere, even if the primary site becomes unavailable—delivering true business continuity for the virtual desktop infrastructure.

📺 Learn More About Ensuring VDI Resilience.
Watch our detailed on-demand webinar with VergeIO, Inuvika, and Kelley Allen from CCSI demonstrating their resilient VDI solution.
Register here.

Conclusion

VDI success depends on reliability. Organizations investing in virtual desktops must ensure their infrastructure is built for resilience, not just performance. Traditional RAID-based storage and clustered compute architectures introduce points of failure that can disrupt users and drive up IT support costs.

A resilient VDI platform must:

  • Protect against node and drive failures without downtime.
  • Eliminate RAID limitations with a more flexible, distributed storage approach.
  • Automate recovery and rebalancing to minimize IT intervention.
  • Ensure uninterrupted user access, no matter what happens at the hardware level.

By choosing an integrated, efficient, fault-tolerant architecture, IT leaders can provide a seamless, always-on VDI experience that outperforms the reliability of any physical laptop or desktop.

A Double-Protected VMware Alternative

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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.

Elevate Your Infrastructure

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When considering an alternative to VMware, it’s essential to elevate your infrastructure rather than simply seeking cost savings. Elevating your infrastructure means improving data protection, resiliency, and availability—critical elements that should define your next virtualization platform. In this post, we’ll explore the key features you should demand in a modern virtualization platform, and how VergeIO delivers on those expectations.

How to Elevate Your Infrastructure with Better Data Resilience

Snapshot Technology

In today’s IT environments, preparing for potential data loss, corruption, or accidental deletions is crucial. One of the most vital features in any virtualization platform is advanced snapshot technology. Traditional snapshots are often plagued by performance bottlenecks and limited retention, resulting in large gaps in protection. Many organizations are forced to take only one snapshot per day to feed their backup software, which is no longer enough.

To elevate your infrastructure, your VMware alternative should provide frequent, independent snapshots that don’t rely on redirect-on-write techniques. These snapshots should maintain system performance while allowing multiple snapshots throughout the day. This enhances Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), ensuring fast recovery when needed.

Workload Isolation

Secure workload isolation is key to protecting mission-critical workloads. Multi-tenancy ensures individual workloads are isolated for better performance and enhanced security. With an elevated infrastructure, you can place mission-critical applications in their own tenants, isolating them from less critical workloads. If ransomware attacks a user workload, it won’t spread to other tenants.

Multi-tenancy also streamlines disaster recovery (DR). By encapsulating consistent states of networking, storage, and virtual machines, the failover process becomes simpler and more reliable, improving your DR capabilities. Frequent testing becomes easier, encouraging proactive planning.

Key considerations include:

  • Robust isolation mechanisms to protect workloads.
  • Custom backup policies for each workload.
  • Encapsulated DR processes for easy recovery.

Protection from Hardware Failures

Look for a VMware alternative that can elevate your infrastructure by withstanding multiple simultaneous hardware failures. While most platforms can handle a single failure, resilient virtualization solutions keep workloads running even during multiple failures.

Look for virtualization platforms that offer self-healing capabilities to automatically reroute workloads to available hardware, ensuring minimal downtime. Solutions that provide affordable redundancy can enable high availability without requiring excessive resources.

Disaster Recovery

A comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is key to elevating your infrastructure. While backup solutions play a crucial role, they must be paired with automated disaster recovery capabilities. DR should be fully integrated into the platform, with failover and failback processes automated to ensure that workloads remain available during outages. Frequent DR testing without disrupting production is also essential for preparing your infrastructure for worst-case scenarios.

Importance of a Separate Backup Process for Long-Term Retention

While advanced snapshots and disaster recovery are critical, they cannot replace the need for a separate backup process to ensure compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule. This rule mandates that organizations maintain three copies of their data: two on different storage media and one offsite.

An effective VMware alternative should integrate seamlessly with separate backup solutions that can provide long-term retention and offsite storage. This process ensures compliance, protects against ransomware, and meets legal or regulatory data retention requirements. Moreover, having a distinct backup solution enables organizations to recover data from further back in time, providing more flexibility and protection in the event of an unexpected disaster or human error.

Backup considerations include:

  • Immutable backups that cannot be modified or deleted, providing extra protection against ransomware.
  • Offsite storage for compliance with the 3-2-1 rule.
  • Long-term retention capabilities that meet regulatory and legal requirements.

VergeIO: Elevate Your Infrastructure

Among the many VMware alternatives, VergeIO stands out by offering more than just an alternative—it elevates your infrastructure, particularly in the realm of data protection and resiliency.

Elevate Your Infrastructure with Advanced IOclone Technology

VergeOS’s IOclone technology takes data protection to the next level. Unlike traditional snapshots that slow down performance and use excessive storage, IOclone creates fully independent snapshots of virtual machines, instances, or virtual data centers. Snapshots are optimized with inline deduplication, maximizing storage efficiency while maintaining high performance.

Elevate Your Infrastructure

These independent snapshots mean that even if the original data is deleted, the snapshot remains intact. This capability allows IT teams to take frequent snapshots and reduce their RPO and RTO, enabling granular recovery of full virtual data centers, individual VMs, or even specific files. Experience using snapshots for granular recovery in our hands-on lab.

Elevate Your Infrastructure with Virtual Data Centers

VergeOS provides secure multi-tenancy but takes it a step further by delivering virtual data centers for each tenant. These virtual data centers encapsulate networking, storage, and compute resources into consolidated objects, allowing complete environments to be recovered quickly during outages.

This encapsulation minimizes recovery delays, offering a more robust approach to disaster recovery by ensuring all configuration files are in sync and workloads are restored seamlessly. See how to use virtual data centers right now in our hands-on lab.

Elevate Your Infrastructure by Protecting it from Hardware Failures

VergeOS’ self-healing architecture detects failures in real-time, rerouting workloads automatically to minimize downtime. VergeOS provides affordable redundancy, ensuring high availability without the need for resource duplication.

Elevate Your Infrastructure

For greater protection, VergeOS includes ioGuardian, an integrated capability which offers inline recovery in case of catastrophic multiple simultaneous hardware failures. ioGuardian delivers missing data segments to virtual machines in real-time, enabling VMs to remain operational and saving you from resorting to your backup software.

Elevate Your Infrastructure by Exceeding the 3-2-1 Rule

While VergeOS provides robust snapshot technology and integrated disaster recovery, working with Storware ensures complete compliance with the 3-2-1 backup rule. Storware offers an advanced backup solution that integrates seamlessly with VergeOS’s snapshot capabilities, allowing organizations to meet long-term retention and offsite storage requirements.

Storware’s incremental forever backups ensure that only changed data is backed up after the initial full backup, minimizing storage use while still offering comprehensive protection. Storware also supports immutable backups, which are critical for protecting against ransomware and accidental deletions.

Conclusion: VergeIO is the Future of Virtualization

Don’t just settle for a VMware alternative that maintains the status quo. Elevate your infrastructure with VergeIO, a solution that improves snapshot technology, workload isolation, resiliency against failures, and integrated disaster recovery.

Next Steps

  • Explore more about VergeIO’s approach to data protection through our on-demand webinar “Protecting VergeOS.”
  • Experience VergeOS first-hand by signing up for our hands-on lab here.
  • Download our solution brief for an in-depth look at how VergeIO and Storware provide complete data protection.

Storware Partners with VergeIO to Deliver a Comprehensive Data Resiliency and Virtualization Solution

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Warsaw, Poland – September 24, 2024 – Storware, a European leader in enterprise data backup and recovery, renowned for its stability and seamless integration capabilities, has announced a strategic partnership with VergeIO, the leading provider of ultraconverged infrastructure. This collaboration addresses the growing market demand for turnkey solutions that deliver an integrated data center operating environment with end-to-end backup, disaster recovery, and robust protection against ransomware.

VergeIO, a pioneer in VMware alternatives, offers effortless solutions for deploying powerful platforms using existing hardware while enhancing data resiliency and performance. The VergeOS software is more than just a VMware alternative—it provides superior efficiency, leading to better performance, scalability, hardware resiliency, upfront cost savings, and significant long-term reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO). The flexible, hardware-agnostic approach simplifies project launches with minimal technical setup while maintaining high availability and workload scalability.

The collaboration between Storware and VergeIO strengthens data security, ensuring confidentiality and business continuity. This partnership offers significant benefits for businesses of all types and sizes, enabling them to build robust infrastructures for a wide range of environments, including secure research (HPC), hyperconverged data centers, and multi-tenant private clouds.

Key Benefits of the Partnership:

  • A unified solution for simplifying data center virtualization and infrastructure management.
  • Enables organizations to build or scale IT environments using end-to-end software rapidly, minimizing costs and deployment times.
  • Storware Backup and Recovery integrates seamlessly with VergeOS, offering a centralized console for managing backup tasks while supporting the creation of fully encapsulated virtual data centers.
  • The hardware-agnostic infrastructure supports evolving business demands and accelerates growth.
  • Significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) as environments scale.

“The Storware-VergeIO partnership is not just about collaboration; it’s about creating synergy between innovation and expertise to accelerate technological transformation,” said Jan Sobieszczanski, CEO of Storware. “We’re excited to offer a joint solution that combines VergeOS’ unique ultraconverged infrastructure with Storware’s powerful Backup and Recovery capabilities. Together, we’re ready to tackle emerging market challenges head-on.”

Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO, added, “Integrating Storware Backup and Recovery with VergeOS provides customers with confidence as they transition from VMware. The combined solution enhances cybersecurity with rapid backups, including incremental and differential backups, granular recovery options, and automated backup scheduling. This partnership makes virtualization and moving to fully functional, resilient virtual data centers a turnkey solution.”

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the future of virtualization and the leading VMware alternative. Unlike hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), VergeIO’s ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) collapses the traditional IT stack (compute, storage, and networking) into a single, integrated data center operating environment: VergeOS. This approach allows organizations to achieve greater workload density, improved data resiliency and simplified IT management using their existing hardware—resulting in lower costs and higher availability. VergeOS delivers better performance, scalability, hardware resiliency, and significant upfront and long-term cost savings.

For more information, visit www.verge.io.

About Storware

Storware is a European enterprise data backup and recovery solutions provider recognized for its stability and comprehensive platform integration. Storware secures data across virtual machines, containers, cloud environments, and applications, including Microsoft 365. It supports a variety of backup destinations, such as file systems and object storage, and acts as a proxy for enterprise backup providers. Established in 2013 in Warsaw, Poland, Storware continues expanding its reach through a robust global distribution and partner network.

Connect with Storware on Facebook, LinkedIn, or visit storware. eu for more information.

Media Contacts:

Tasha Kobzarenko
Product Marketing Manager, Storware
[email protected]

Judy Smith
JPR Communications, representing VergeIO
[email protected]
(818) 522-9673

Using Snapshots to Protect VMs

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Seasoned IT professionals frequently advise against using snapshots to protect VMs because of the limitations in the snapshot methodology common in today’s storage systems and software solutions. However, VergeOS has a unique approach, thanks to its integrated, cohesive operating environment that redefines the role of snapshots in data protection, making them the go-to option when administrators need to recover data.

The Challenges of Using Snapshots to Protect VMs

Despite their potential to address up to 90% of non-hardware-related recovery scenarios, snapshots are one of the most underutilized features in data protection. The core issue with today’s snapshot technologies lies in the widespread use of the redirect-on-write snapshot management method. While an improvement over the outdated copy-on-write technique, redirect-on-write still has significant challenges, particularly in modern data frameworks.

Each redirected write increases storage system overhead, which leads to noticeable performance degradation as the number of active snapshots grows. To counteract this, storage systems often require additional memory and processing power, which drives up costs. Software-based solutions, such as those provided by VMware, lack this flexibility, resulting in significant performance impacts even with a few active snapshots.

Additionally, redirect-on-write snapshots heavily depend on the integrity of preceding snapshots and the original volume. If any of these elements fail, the entire snapshot becomes unusable. This limitation directly conflicts with the 3-2-1 backup rule, which mandates maintaining three separate copies of data on two storage systems, with one copy off-site.

Common Use Cases and the Untapped Potential of Snapshots

Due to traditional snapshots’ inherent limitations, organizations often limit their use, primarily utilizing them to feed backup software. Typically, a snapshot is taken, backed up, and then deleted. This restricted use prevents snapshots from reaching their full potential in data protection.

If the limitations of snapshots could be overcome, they could significantly enhance an organization’s ability to recover from minor data loss events and major disasters.
Snapshots offer several key advantages:

  1. Speed: Snapshots can be created in milliseconds.
  2. Minimal Capacity Impact: Snapshots can be retained almost indefinitely with negligible storage impact.
  3. Instant Recovery: Since data remains on the device, recovery is almost immediate.

VergeOS and ioClone Make Using Snapshots to Protect VMs a Reality

To unlock the full potential of snapshots, the technology must overcome traditional limitations and align with the 3-2-1 backup rule by providing:

  • Independence
  • Zero Performance Impact
  • Transportability
  • Long-Term Retention
  • Single File Recovery

Using snapshots to protect VMs

VergeOS has redefined snapshot technology with its innovative approach powered by IOclone. Unlike traditional snapshots that rely on the outdated redirect-on-write method, VergeOS uses IOclone technology to create complete, independent copies of selected objects (entire instances, virtual data centers, or virtual machines). VergeOS’s integrated deduplication ensures that these snapshots are instantly optimized, making the snapshot process as fast, if not faster, than traditional methods while consuming less overall capacity. VergeOS makes using snapshots to protect VMs a viable part of any data protection strategy.

This approach means VergeOS snapshots are independent of other snapshots and the original object being snapshotted. Even if the primary object is deleted, you can mount the snapshot of that object and continue operations without interruption. Additionally, you can maintain as many active snapshots as needed and keep them for years without impacting performance.

Using snapshots to protect VMs

VergeOS’s ioGuardian, known for its real-time recovery capabilities, further enhances snapshot transportability. Because ioGuardian and VergeOS share the same deduplication algorithm, they work seamlessly together, allowing snapshots to be automatically pushed to the ioGuardian server for rapid updates and storage on a secondary in-data-center device. While most data centers back up once per night, VergeIO customers leveraging ioGuardian can create a full backup every hour without full backup capacity requirements.

These advanced snapshots, combined with VergeOS’s deduplication, also power ioReplicate for off-site data transfer. Independent snapshot schedules are supported on both ioGuardian and ioReplicate storage systems.

Finally, VergeOS snapshots provide robust single-file recovery capabilities. IT can easily mount a snapshot as a drive within a VM and copy the required file back to the production VM without any downtime. It’s a fast and straightforward process, but you don’t have to take our word for it. You can register for our latest hands-on lab to experience creating a VM, taking a snapshot, and recovering a file in action.

Conclusion

VergeOS transforms how organizations use snapshots to protect VMs by overcoming the limitations of traditional redirect-on-write snapshot technology. With features like IOclone, ioGuardian, and ioReplicate, VergeOS provides an independent, high-performing, and versatile snapshot solution ideal for using snapshots to protect VMs. This allows businesses to recover quickly from data loss events and ensures that their data protection strategies are robust and cost-effective.

If you are exploring a VMware alternative or planning a storage refresh, snapshots are just one of the many powerful features offered by VergeIO’s storage capabilities. VergeOS delivers a comprehensive suite of storage services integrated into VergeOS that are not only advanced but also highly cost-effective. Its integrated approach ensures that your infrastructure remains resilient, flexible, and ready to meet the demands of modern IT environments. Set up a whiteboard deep dive with me to learn how VergeOS can be your VMware Alternative or your next storage platform.

Book a Session

By integrating VergeOS into your IT infrastructure, you can maximize the benefits of snapshots and elevate your data protection to new heights while optimizing your storage strategy with a solution designed for the future.