Edge

by

Ann Arbor, MI — September 16, 2025 — VergeIO, the leading VMware alternative, today announced a partnership with Cirrus Data Solutions (CDS), a leader in data mobility technology and services, to help enterprises eliminate infrastructure sprawl—the costly mix of multiple hypervisors, duplicate tools, and isolated stacks, that has crept into data centers. The collaboration combines Cirrus Data’s patented software-only data mobility technology with VergeOS, the industry’s only single-codebase infrastructure operating system for virtualization, storage, networking, and AI.

Sprawl has accelerated as organizations juggle VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, OpenStack, and public cloud IaaS. The result is higher licensing spend, fragmented operations, and slow recovery. VergeIO and Cirrus Data address both sides of the problem: a universal migration path that keeps production online and a unifying destination that consolidates platforms into one operating model.

  • Cirrus Data delivers zero downtime migrations for clustered applications. Its software-only solution can migrate from nearly any hypervisor, including VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM), Proxmox, OpenStack, and others, in addition to the public cloud IaaS. Organizations can now automate the move of heterogeneous estates on schedule and without disruption.
  • VergeOS replaces stacked products with a single operating system covering virtualization, storage, networking, and AI. Per-server licensing, hardware portability, and deep abstraction extend hardware life and simplify operations across core, edge, ROBO (remote office/branch office), and Venues.

Review the VergeIO/Cirrus Data solution brief to learn more.

“Sprawl is the tax on indecision,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “Enterprises didn’t plan to run three hypervisors and a cloud sidecar, but that’s where the market led them. Our partnership with Cirrus Data gives IT a practical way out: move everything with minimal downtime and land on a single, cohesive platform.”

“Consolidation isn’t a one-off,” said Wayne Lam, CEO of Cirrus Data. “Our data mobility solutions give organizations an easy, automated way to securely migrate every acquisition or new business unit to VergeOS quickly, regardless of the starting platform. With Cirrus Data and VergeIO, organizations can prevent sprawl from returning and keep operations streamlined.”

According to analysis highlighted in VergeIO’s new white paper and solution brief, enterprises that consolidate into VergeOS with Cirrus Data can reduce three-year total cost of ownership by 50%+, achieve 12–18 month payback, and gain a platform ready for private AI without standing up separate clusters.

To learn more, register here for the VergeIO/Cirrus webinar on 9/25 at 1:00pm ET.

About VergeIO
VergeIO is the VMware alternative. Its ultraconverged infrastructure platform, VergeOS, integrates virtualization, storage, networking, and AI into a single operating system with unmatched simplicity and cost savings. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, VergeIO helps enterprises, service providers, and public sector organizations consolidate infrastructure, extend hardware life, and prepare for the future of AI.

About Cirrus Data
Cirrus Data Solutions Inc. (CDS) is a leader in the block data mobility technology and services market for global enterprises. The company distributes its solutions through systems integrators, managed service providers, channel resellers, and partners. CDS is headquartered in Syosset, New York, with support centers in Dublin, Ireland, and Nanjing, China, with sales and support offices in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Denver, London, Melbourne, Munich, and Tampa. For more information, visit CDS online https://cirrusdata.com/cloud-migration-vergeio 

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

Media Contact:
Julie McKenna
Cirrus Data
[email protected] 

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: , , , , ,

by

Storage challenges at distributed sites are inhibiting organizations that want to reduce reliance on the cloud and instead extend workloads into remote offices, retail sites, venues, and edge locations. Storage is the critical obstacle preventing these distributed sites from operating effectively.

IT was promised that all data could be centralized in the cloud, but the lack of independence and the high costs of storing and moving data make that approach impractical. What once lived in a data center or the cloud must now be delivered locally at dozens or hundreds of sites, each with tight limits on space, staff, and budget.

Register Now

These environments show varied workload needs: some sites need high-capacity storage for video, others require high performance for real-time tasks, and some demand intensive AI processing. Many sites have a mix of these needs, often with limited IT staff, rack space, and budgets. Balancing cost, performance, capacity, and manageability is essential.

The stakes are high. Availability expectations for remote locations often exceed those for the data center. Many are more than customer-facing—they are customer-touching, directly impacting the customer experience. Protection from hardware failure is essential, as is rapid recovery at another site or the data center in case of disaster.

Balancing Storage Demands at the Site

One of the storage challenges at distributed sites is balancing the performance and capacity needs, which can vary greatly. Some require high-performance storage for real-time tasks like point-of-sale, video analytics, or sensors. Others need high-capacity storage for surveillance videos, medical images, or records. Some sites face both demands. Without proper balance, workloads either stall due to latency or run out of space before meeting retention needs.

IT teams are forced to choose between costly, oversized storage that wastes resources and basic local disks lacking resilience. Direct-attached drives offer decent performance but risk disruptions if a drive or server fails. Hyperconverged solutions reduce risk but are costly and may impact performance. None provides the ideal balance of resilience and affordability.

How VergeOS Helps: VergeOS addresses these challenges by collapsing storage, compute, and networking into a single code base, delivering both performance and capacity in the smallest possible footprint. IT teams can size hardware to each site’s exact needs while still getting enterprise-class data services like global deduplication, snapshots, and replication. This unified approach gives small sites the same capabilities as large ones, without oversized appliances or fragile local disks.

Download our white paper: “A Comprehensive Guide to a VMware Exit for Multi-Site Organizations.“

Remote Site Storage Protection and Recovery Gaps

If performance and capacity are difficult to balance at remote sites, protecting the data stored there is even harder. Skilled IT professionals can get these sites backed up, but it is expensive because of WAN bandwidth requirements and high software costs.

Local snapshot capabilities could fix these issues, but low-end storage appliances often lack such features or require costly upgrades. Direct-attached storage has no snapshot option. Hyperconverged storage offers limited snapshots, which can impact performance. Hardware failures mean restoring from outdated backups, risking data loss or downtime at remote sites.

The recovery challenge is just as severe. Moving large amounts of data back across limited WAN bandwidth can take days. Outages from fiber cuts or local disruptions always occur at the worst possible time—such as in the middle of a long backup job. When the connection is restored, the job must start over, wasting time and leaving data exposed.

Testing disaster recovery across dozens or hundreds of sites is time-consuming and often overlooked. In many cases, the first time recovery procedures are attempted is during a real-life failure—when the pressure is highest and tolerance for mistakes is lowest.

How VergeOS Helps: VergeOS solves these issues by making data protection a built-in function, not an add-on. Instant, immutable snapshots and WAN-efficient replication are integrated into the platform, ensuring consistent recovery options across all sites. Organizations no longer depend on fragile appliance snapshots or expensive backup software. By unifying storage and protection in one system, VergeOS makes recovery faster, more predictable, and resilient even across limited WAN connections.

Remote Storage Operational Fragmentation

Organizations manage diverse storage solutions, which become even more complex at distributed sites. The core data center uses SAN and NAS, while edge and remote offices typically rely on direct-attached storage, hypervisor-based storage, and backup appliances. Each layer has different tools, update cycles, and licensing models.

Storage Challenges at Distributed Sites

The result is operational fragmentation. IT staff must jump between consoles to monitor health, provision capacity, and validate protection. Policies differ by vendor, features behave inconsistently, and vendors update on different schedules. Without a single source of truth, it becomes challenging to determine which sites meet data protection requirements, have adequate recovery points, or are drifting out of alignment.

Another one of the top storage challenges at distributed sites is that storage features which appear similar, may work differently across platforms. Drive failure protection, replication, deduplication, encryption, and snapshots may all exist, but each behaves in its own way depending on the vendor, and they don’t understand each other. Vendor A can’t replicate to Vendor B, and Vendor C can’t leverage deduplication metadata from Vendor D. This inconsistency makes it nearly impossible to apply a single policy or rely on predictable results. These inconsistencies also exacerbate the IT skills gap.

How VergeOS Helps: VergeOS replaces fragmented tools with a unified management plane and consistent features across every site. This eliminates silos and provides a single source of truth for monitoring, reporting, and compliance. It also eliminates inconsistency by applying global inline deduplication across the entire infrastructure—core, ROBO, edge, and venue locations. Deduplication is not siloed per vendor or appliance; identical blocks of data are recognized once, no matter where they originate. This reduces capacity requirements, improves replication efficiency across sites, and ensures all data management policies work consistently everywhere. Just as importantly, this same consistency extends to all features—snapshots, replication, encryption, and drive failure protection—so policies behave uniformly across every site.


The Path Forward: Unified Infrastructure Software

Solving the fragmentation issue requires more than incremental gains; the real challenge is architectural. Sites depend on diverse storage products, increasing complexity and risk. IT must unify infrastructure via a single software platform that offers storage, virtualization, and networking uniformly across multiple locations and supports diverse hardware.

A unified infrastructure platform eliminates storage challenges at distributed sites, such as the sprawl of consoles and feature sets. Replication, snapshots, deduplication, encryption, and drive failure protection all behave the same way whether they are deployed in the core data center, a regional office, or a small remote site. Policies can be defined once and applied everywhere, giving IT predictable outcomes.

This approach creates a single source of truth. Monitoring, reporting, and compliance data come from one system, giving IT visibility across the entire environment instead of forcing them to reconcile information from multiple consoles. With unified telemetry, trends are easier to spot, issues easier to diagnose, and compliance more straightforward to prove.

Operationally, benefits are immediate. IT teams spend less time managing incompatible tools and more on delivering value. Features work equally well at small and large sites—small sites get advanced capabilities without oversized appliances, and the core maintains resiliency without siloed complexity. Licensing and support are streamlined, avoiding duplication and waste from fragmentation.

Storage Challenges at Distributed Sites

Unified infrastructure software removes inconsistency, not choice. Teams can make per-site decisions on hardware, but standardizing the software layer across sites creates a resilient, easy-to-manage, scalable foundation. Architectural simplicity is essential for sustainable distributed infrastructure.

How VergeOS Helps: VergeOS delivers this architectural simplicity today via its ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) design, which consolidates storage, virtualization, and networking into one tightly integrated code base. This ensures consistent features, policies, and management across every site—edge, ROBO, venue, and core—providing a unified foundation that scales without multiplying complexity.

Conclusion

Distributed sites are essential to modern operations, but traditional storage models were never built for environments with limited space, staff, and budgets. The result is a recurring cycle of over-provisioning, fragile local infrastructure, and operational silos that add cost and risk with every new site.

The solution to overcoming the storage challenges at distributed sites lies not in more point products but in a unified architectural approach. By consolidating storage, compute, networking, and data protection into one code base, VergeOS removes fragmentation and delivers consistent capabilities across every location. The result is simpler management, stronger resiliency, and predictable scalability.

Organizations that adopt this model can treat distributed sites as first-class citizens of the enterprise infrastructure—resilient, efficient, and prepared for the future.

Click here to learn more about VergeIO’s distributed sites solution.

Filed Under: Edge Computing Tagged With: , ,

by

upgrade Edge data protection

The Broadcom acquisition of VMware is prompting IT leaders to reassess remote deployments, making it an ideal time to upgrade Edge data protection. The Edge encompasses Remote Office Branch Offices (ROBO), Venues in the entertainment industry, and true Edge sites for data collection.

Organizations with any or all of these location types adopted VMware for server consolidation, not resilience. A few small servers could run all workloads and remain online without the cloud or core, providing local processing and independence in the event of a WAN failure.

Now the economics and packaging of VMware have changed, but exiting VMware should be more than a hypervisor swap. It’s a chance to upgrade edge VMware protection and DR.

upgrade Edge data protection

Doing so can reduce licensing and hardware costs, eliminate redundant backup appliances, and enhance recovery speed after outages or accidental deletions. It also prepares IT for new edge use cases, such as AI inference, where local processing demands stronger resilience and faster recovery. If you are an IT professional with multiple sites, download our comprehensive guide to a VMware exit for multi-site organizations.

The Old Data Protection Model

Backup dependency
VMware offered rudimentary edge protection. Customers relied on third-party backup appliances or agents, each with extra licensing, hardware, and management overhead. This added cost and complexity for ROBO and venue sites which typically have little or no IT staff. Backup servers and storage arrays also consumed precious rack space that edge and ROBO locations rarely had. This is why it is time to upgrade Edge data protection.

Replication challenges
Replication was never native. Organizations turned to SRM or external tools, which were complex, expensive, and impractical for small sites. Many locations simply went unprotected.

Snapshot limitations
VMware snapshots were tied to VMFS or vSAN, resulting in degraded performance and increased capacity consumption. Many customers avoided them or used them as a temporary staging copy for backup before deleting. VMware’s own documentation warns that snapshots should not be considered a form of protection.

Recovery gaps
Recovering workloads was a complex process that required the use of runbooks. These were manually created, brittle, and often untested until a crisis. Testing DR was especially hard for venues and edge sites with limited or no maintenance windows. The first “test” was usually a real outage, with predictable failures.

Scale mismatch
VMware’s protection stack was designed for four to sixteen node clusters, not two- or three-node sites. vSAN requires at least three nodes or two plus a witness, adding cost and complexity. VxRail requires four or five nodes—well beyond the needs and budgets of edge or ROBO locations.

Why VMware Data Protection Falls Short

VMware’s protection model was never designed for distributed sites. It layered point products on top of the hypervisor and left IT to tie them together, resulting in tool sprawl, increased overhead, and higher costs—another reason why it’s time to upgrade Edge data protection.

Tool sprawl
Even with central management, IT had to juggle separate logins, passwords, and consoles across dozens or hundreds of sites. Context switching became exponential overhead.

Fragile protection
RPOs were measured in hours or days, with even longer RTOs. Every restore relied on backup servers and brittle runbooks. Secondary backup steps added delays and new failure points.

No cyber recovery
VMware snapshots—whether standard or vSAN—were not immutable, and replicas usually lived in the same location. A ransomware attack or corruption could wipe out both production and “protected” copies.

Inconsistent coverage
Some sites were protected, others were not. It could take weeks to notice, and even longer to diagnose. Without a shared telemetry stream, IT had to log in and out of multiple systems, making correlation across sites nearly impossible.

Testing and validation gap
DR testing was rare. Venues and edge sites have little or no downtime, so runbooks went untested. The first recovery attempt usually came during an outage, with poor results.

The Modern Model: Integrated Data Protection

upgrade Edge data protection

VergeOS eliminates the sprawl of point products by integrating protection directly into the same stack that delivers virtualization and storage. This changes protection from an add-on to a native capability and is clearly a way to upgrade Edge data protection.

Site virtualization
VMware virtualized servers. VergeOS virtualizes entire sites. Its Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology captures workloads, storage, and networking as one logical entity. A VDC can be migrated to the core, another site, or a new facility, enabling protection and mobility beyond VM portability. It also allows patch testing by cloning an entire site into a safe environment for updates and validation before production.

Built-in snapshots
Snapshots in VergeOS are instant, immutable, and policy-driven. They can be taken at the site, VDC, or VM level, with recovery just as granular. They impose no performance hit and avoid capacity sprawl, so they can be kept long enough to provide real protection.

Native replication
Replication is built in. It is lightweight, policy-based, and supports site-to-site, hub-and-spoke, or paired topologies—removing the need for SRM or third-party tools. Policies can be defined once and applied everywhere. Combined with VDC virtualization, recovery works the first time, bringing an entire site back online in a few clicks.

Policy-driven tiers
Different site types can be assigned different protection profiles. A ROBO might use nightly replication, a venue may require aggressive POS and video protection, and edge sites can run short-interval snapshots. Policies are defined centrally and enforced locally.

Cyber recovery isolation
VergeOS snapshots are read-only, and replicas can live in independent locations, giving IT true isolation. Clean copies can be launched for testing without impacting production, making cyber recovery a routine process.

Centralized fleet management
Policies, snapshots, replication, and compliance are visible in a single console. Upgrades can be staged regionally and rolled out live, even across hundreds of sites.

AI-aware protection
With VergeIQ GPU workloads at the edge can be protected just like VMs. VergeOS snapshots and replication cover models, embeddings, and inference data, allowing rollbacks, recovery, or moves alongside the rest of the site.

VMware vs. VergeOS Data Protection

CapabilityVMware / Legacy ApproachVergeOS Integrated Model
SnapshotsTied to vSAN/VMFS, performance hitInstant, immutable, no impact
ReplicationSRM or 3rd party, costly/complexNative, lightweight, policy-driven
BackupRequires separate appliancesBuilt-in to core platform
RecoveryManual runbooks, brittleConsistent object recovery, few clicks
Cyber RecoveryNot immutable, no isolationImmutable snapshots, isolated replicas
Fleet ManagementMany consoles, siloed telemetryOne pane across all sites

Edge Data Protection’s Impact on the Core

upgrade Edge data protection

Running the same software stack at the edge and in the core delivers consistency VMware never offered. VergeOS runs everywhere, so IT doesn’t need different tools for small sites and large clusters. Operations are predictable, upgrades are faster, and risk is reduced.

Replication from the edge to the core is straightforward. Sites arrive as complete Virtual Data Centers, making recovery as simple as starting a consistent object instead of piecing workloads together.

The core can host tenants by geography or business unit, define protection policies once, and push them everywhere. Fleet-level upgrades and policies can be staged regionally and applied without downtime.

Observability is unified. VergeOS provides a single telemetry stream, eliminating the need to chase logs across multiple products. IT sees protection status and compliance in one console.

The core becomes the foundation for AI. Models can be trained centrally, distributed to sites, and protected with the same snapshots and replication used for VMs.

With VergeOS, the edge and core operate as one system, running the same software with the same protection capabilities.

Conclusion

The Broadcom acquisition of VMware forces a choice. IT can either repeat the old model with another hypervisor and bolt-on tools, or take the opportunity to build something better.

Exiting VMware should not be a lateral move. It should be an upgrade. By integrating snapshots, replication, site virtualization, and fleet visibility, VergeOS replaces fragile point products with one platform. Protection becomes routine, recovery becomes reliable, and AI readiness is built in.

The VMware exit is more than just a cost issue—it is the chance to reset edge data protection and lay the foundation for the next decade.

Filed Under: Edge Computing Tagged With: , , ,

by

The network standardization myth convinces IT leaders that choosing one networking hardware vendor and deploying identical hardware everywhere creates operational simplicity. The theory sounds logical: manage everything through a single interface and reduce complexity through uniformity, but in reality, deployments at scale tell a different story. Single-Vendor Networking adds cost and delay, and it limits the ability to adapt when sites, budgets, and timelines vary.

The network standardization myth

Where Single-Vendor Networking Breaks Down

Cost exposes the network standardization myth first. A single name-brand adds a premium at every site, as licenses, feature tiers, and “smart” subscriptions stacked onto the price and support contracts, raise the run rate each year. Edge locations rarely need every feature on a datasheet, and off-the-shelf switches and routers with basic L2/L3, VLANs, ACLs, and QoS meet the need at a lower cost when networking policy can be applied across hardware.

Pricing varies by region and quarter, and big brands tie discounts to volume and ELAs that small sites seldom reach, resulting in higher costs. Freight, currency, and local channel margins widen the gap, while commodity gear from local resellers keeps costs down and ships faster. The feature set may be smaller, but SDN supports advanced policies, so operations remain consistent.

Refresh and lifecycle add more cost. End-of-sale notices prompt fleet swaps to maintain support, and feature reshuffles necessitate new SKUs even when ports and speeds remain the same. Working gear leaves the rack to preserve a logo, but with SDN above the hardware, teams keep simpler devices longer and replace them based on price and availability, not branding.

Mergers add more drift. Acquired sites run other brands that work, and ripping them out raises risk and cost. Retrofits also hit space and power limits that a “standard” chassis cannot meet, and compliance rules may require features a niche model provides while the chosen vendor does not.

SDN: The Alternative to Single Vendor Networking

Software-defined networking addresses the network standardization myth by moving control into software, allowing switches and routers to focus on transport while maintaining consistent policy and visibility across different brands. Teams learn one model and apply it everywhere, training drops and rollouts speed up, and purchasing shifts from “the” box to “a” fit-for-purpose box that is available now.

Disaster recovery is simplified because the organization no longer needs to build for separate scenarios for each hardware mix at remote sites. As a result, one runbook covers failover, testing, and return to service across locations.

The promise of standardization is consistent operations, and SDN delivers that consistency through abstraction, not uniform metal.

Why didn’t SDN bust the single-vendor networking myth?

Early SDN shipped as a separate software stack. Teams had to deploy and run a second platform next to existing networks. Installation was complex, with custom designs, hardware matrices, and site-by-site tuning. Licensing and services were expensive, so many stayed with one hardware brand to keep risk predictable.

What is needed now is SDN integrated into a data center operating system. Integration enables automatic installation, simplifies learning and daily operations, and reduces costs.

VergeOS: One Platform For Core And Edge

VergeOS is the Data Center Operating System. It combines four integrated components:

Debunking The network standardization myth with VergeOS
  • VergeHV for virtual machines and containers with low overhead
  • VergeFS for a global file system with inline, always-on deduplication across the cluster so data does not rehydrate when it moves across hosts or tiers
  • VergeFabric for secure, segmented connectivity across sites and clouds
  • VergeIQ for private AI pipelines, GPU pooling, and model hosting. These parts share a single control plane, so policies span compute, storage, and networking. A change in one layer is immediately visible to the others without requiring bolt-on tools.

Eliminate Single Vendor Networking and Exit VMware

VergeOS runs on standard x86 servers. Many customers reuse existing hosts and storage while they phase out VMware licensing at their pace. VergeHV supports all workloads and maintains a simple operational model. VergeFS absorbs current datasets with global deduplication to reduce footprint and accelerate protection jobs. VergeFabric maps existing VLANs and segments into software, allowing teams to avoid large switch swaps on day one.

Procurement Flexibility Without Chaos

With VergeFabric in place, switching and routing brands become choices, not constraints, and sites buy what is available and supported locally. Operations still look the same because policy resides in software, and VergeFS breaks storage lock-in by supporting mixed media and tiers across nodes, allowing capacity to be added based on what the region stocks and what the budget allows.

Ready For Private AI At The Edge And The Core

VergeIQ consolidates scattered GPUs into a pooled resource, allowing teams to assign GPUs to jobs across clusters without incurring vendor-specific vGPU taxes. Training runs in the core, where power and scale are key, inference runs at the edge, where latency is crucial, and data remains under corporate control. VergeFS feeds AI pipelines from a single namespace with high dedupe ratios to reduce read and write pressure, and VergeFabric carries encrypted, segmented traffic for data sync and model updates. There are no unexpected cloud costs associated with token utilization.

One Design, All Footprints, No Single Vendor Networking

Enterprises need scale in the core and small footprints at the edge, and VergeOS supports both with the same software. In the enterprise core, large clusters host many workloads with multi-tenant isolation and high throughput, VergeHV schedules compute densely, VergeFS spreads data with balanced placement and fast rebuilds, and VergeFabric segments production, management, and replication traffic. At the compact edge, clusters run on a few nodes with tight power and space; the same policies apply. VergeFabric builds site-to-site tunnels and prefers the least-cost paths, and VergeFS keeps datasets small through global deduplication to help across slower WAN links, ensuring consistent operations between sites.

Field Proof

Topgolf runs more than 100 venues with different local realities, and their VergeOS deployment delivers the same network and storage behavior across mixed gear. The team buys what ships in each region, keeps the schedule, and avoids forklift work during expansions and acquisitions because control lives in software, not in a label on a faceplate. Retail, manufacturing, and entertainment groups report the same pattern as they source by region, integrate legacy lines, and still operate from a single playbook.

Why This Model Beats Single Vendor Networking

The network standardization myth promises simplicity but adds risk and cost at scale, while SDN returns control to software and opens hardware choice. Teams can also rethink the edge for ROBO sites and keep a central operational model that spans sites and vendors. VergeOS extends the benefits of SDN to compute and storage, enabling teams to exit VMware, retain more of the hardware they own, align purchases with local supply and pricing, and follow a ready path to private AI from the core to the edge under one platform.

Next Steps to Eliminating Single Vendor Networking

Filed Under: Networking Tagged With: ,

by

Organizations, from large retail chains to global entertainment brands, are starting to develop a multi-site VMware alternative strategy that can simplify operations, lower costs, and prepare for future workloads. Recent VMware licensing changes under Broadcom have driven many IT leaders to re-evaluate their entire infrastructure strategy, particularly for remote office/branch office (ROBO) and edge environments.

This post outlines how to build a sustainable multi-site VMware alternative strategy, the risks of replacing VMware with a point hypervisor, and what to look for in a platform that serves both edge and core data centers.

What is Multi-Site IT?

Multi-site IT refers to technology infrastructure that supports operations across multiple distinct locations under a single organization. These locations typically fall into three categories—branches, edge sites, and venues—each with unique requirements.

  • Branches are often smaller office locations or retail outlets that rely on centralized systems but still need local services for productivity.
  • Edge sites process data closer to where it’s generated, often to support real-time analytics or reduce latency, making them critical for workloads like AI inference, manufacturing control, or IoT.
  • Venues are specialized locations—such as entertainment centers, stadiums, or casinos—where local IT must support high volumes of customer interaction and transaction processing.
multi-site VMware alternative strategy

Across all three, core IT requirements include operational independence during WAN or cloud outages, centralized visibility and management, local performance for critical workloads, and integrated capabilities for networking, storage, and data protection.

Define Multi-Site VMware Alternative Requirements

Multi-site environments differ from centralized data centers. Before selecting a VMware alternative, define the following:

multi-site VMware alternative strategy
  • Operational Independence: Each site must operate without WAN or cloud connectivity. This protects mission-critical services like POS, manufacturing controls, and local databases during outages.
  • Remote Management: Centralized administration is vital. Choose a platform that allows monitoring, updates, and troubleshooting without on-site staff.
  • Consistent Architecture: The same software stack should work for both a two-node edge site and a 50-node core data center.
  • Hardware Flexibility: Avoid proprietary hardware requirements. Standard x86 support keeps sourcing flexible.
  • Built-in Resilience: Integrated backup, replication, and recovery eliminate the need for separate tools.

Is the Cloud a Multi-Site VMware Alternative?

Some will look to the cloud as a multi-site VMware alternative strategy. While attractive for scalability, it still depends on continuous connectivity. WAN disruptions can cut off site operations, leaving staff idle and customers frustrated. Over time, “renting” cloud infrastructure often costs more than owning on-premises systems, especially when you factor in ongoing bandwidth charges.

Evaluate Total Cost Impact

When creating a multi-site VMware alternative strategy, look beyond hypervisor licensing.

  • Software Licensing: Favor predictable per-node pricing that doesn’t penalize dense hardware.
  • Hardware Costs: Watch for enforced minimum node counts. Many sites operate well on two or three nodes.
  • Third-Party Tool Elimination: The right platform replaces backup, DR, and monitoring tools.
  • Operational Expenses: Fewer platforms mean less training and less time spent on maintenance.

What to Look For in a Multi-Site VMware Alternative

A practical multi-site VMware alternative strategy should deliver more than just virtualization:

  • Collapsed Stack: Integrate storage, virtualization, networking, and even client-consumable AI into one software platform.
  • Full Edge-to-Core Functionality: The same feature set should be available at small and large sites.
  • Centralized Visibility: A single-pane-of-glass interface for monitoring all sites.
  • Fleet Management: Automated, non-disruptive upgrades during limited maintenance windows; high-level GUI overview of the entire estate.
  • Advanced Networking: Integrated SDN for secure site-to-site connectivity, segmentation, and traffic optimization.
  • Integrated Data Protection: Built-in snapshots, replication, and backup workflows without third-party software.
  • AI Readiness: Support GPU workloads for AI at both the edge and the core.
  • Automation and Integration: Terraform and API-first design for IaC and DevOps workflows.
  • Migration Capabilities: Native tools for smooth VMware workload migration with minimal downtime.

Test the Multi-Site VMware Alternative in Real-World Conditions

Lab results can be misleading. Your evaluation should include:

  • Multi-Site Simulation: Replicate site configurations and WAN conditions.
  • Migration Testing: Validate performance, compatibility, and ease of workload migration.
  • Failure Testing: Confirm operations continue during outages.
  • Centralized Management Validation: Ensure remote monitoring and updates work across all sites.
  • Operational Workflow Testing: Verify backup, restore, and replication without additional tools.

Risks of Delaying or Choosing a Point Hypervisor

Delaying development of a multi-site VMware alternative strategy increases the risk of rising costs and unplanned disruptions. Simply swapping VMware for another hypervisor without rethinking the stack can lead to:

  • Ongoing dependence on multiple vendors
  • Complexity from integrating separate storage, networking, and backup solutions
  • Missed opportunities for cost savings and operational improvements

A Multi-Site VMware Alternative Example: VergeOS

VergeOS is one example of a platform built for distributed environments and can be the backbone of a multi-site VMware alternative strategy. It provides:

multi-site VMware alternative strategy
  • Single Software Stack: Virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection in one code base.
  • Sites Dashboard: Centralized, high-level management of hundreds of sites.
  • Integrated Migration (ioMigrate): VMware workload migration without separate tools.
  • Global Inline Deduplication: WAN-aware storage optimization.
  • Integrated AI (VergeIQ): AI-ready infrastructure for both edge and core.
  • Hardware Agnostic: Runs on standard x86 servers from multiple vendors.

For a real-world example, see Topgolf is Choosing VergeOS, where over 100 venues transitioned from VMware to VergeOS, reducing node counts, cutting costs, and simplifying operations.

Next Steps

If you’re creating a multi-site VMware alternative strategy:

  • Document current and future requirements
  • Identify opportunities to collapse and simplify your stack
  • Select a platform that delivers consistent capability from edge to core
  • Test under realistic operating conditions
  • Download our white paper: “A Comprehensive Guide to a VMware Exit for Multi-Site Organizations”

To hear directly from IT leaders who have done it, register for the Infrastructure Tee-Off Webinar, where Topgolf’s infrastructure team will discuss their migration from VMware to VergeOS. For more insights, read Rethinking ROBO and Edge from StorageSwiss.

Filed Under: Edge Computing Tagged With: ,

by

In his recent blog, “Edge AI and IoT: AI’s Hidden Infrastructure Problem”, Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) explains why edge AI fails. The low success rate is not due to the models themselves. It is due to the fragmented layers of firmware, drivers, and operating environments that underlie them. As Townsend points out, this infrastructure stack creates complexity, spread across diverse hardware at multiple sites. It leads to an operational environment where drift is inevitable, upgrades are inconsistent, and performance is unpredictable. Without a disciplined approach to managing these stacks, edge AI pilot projects rarely transition into stable, scalable production deployments.

VergeIQ, Private AI for Core Data Centers and the Edge

That’s the exact problem VergeIQ is built to solve. VergeIQ is a private, enterprise-class service that provides a complete AI pipeline. It delivers everything from data ingestion and preparation to model training, inference, and lifecycle management.

VergeIQ is embedded directly into VergeOS. It benefits from an infrastructure platform that integrates virtualization, storage, networking, and now AI into a single, cohesive operating environment. It eliminates the multiple, disconnected layers that create drift and operational friction. This unified design allows AI workloads to operate in the same secure, version-controlled environment as other critical enterprise applications.

Edge AI Requires Centralized, Integrated Infrastructure

In VergeOS, AI is a service, like file services: you simply turn it on. There’s no need to provision VMs, deploy containers, or manage separate orchestration layers.

Because AI capabilities are native to VergeOS, IT can provision Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) as siloed AI environments. Each VDC operates with its own isolated compute, storage, and networking resources. The AI “service” can be assigned to whichever VDCs need it. VDCs enable predictable AI performance and security without interfering with other workloads.

Lack of single point of management is one reason why edge AI fails

At the recent Future of Memory and Storage (formerly Flash Memory Summit) event, the VergeOS architecture enabled us to set up three separate AI environments in under an hour. This install time included physical setup, power-on, and connectivity verification. These environments ran as private, self-contained edge AI deployments, without relying on the show’s network. The result is an operational model where AI deployments are as fast to launch as they are secure and repeatable.

Real-Time Inventory and Observability

One of the reasons edge AI fails is that IT struggles to maintain accurate visibility into what is running where. Unknown infrastructure stacks are unmanageable, and without complete telemetry, infrastructure teams are blind to drift until it causes failures. VergeOS addresses this problem with ioMetrics. It captures real-time data about hardware configurations, firmware and driver versions, and operating system builds. This comprehensive view enables the immediate detection of deviations, ensuring that every edge environment remains in a known, validated state.

For organizations managing dozens—or even hundreds—of remote AI deployments, VergeOS’s Sites Dashboard extends that visibility into operational control. Sites Dashboard provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all VergeOS-powered edge locations in real-time. Platform teams can apply updates, adjust configurations, enforce security policies, and spin up or tear down environments across the entire deployment footprint without needing to send personnel on-site.

Edge AI Requires Secure, Unified Deployment

Security is another reason why edge AI fails. At the edge, physical access to devices and diverse deployment locations create an expanded attack surface. VergeIQ enforces secure boot processes, validates firmware integrity, and uses signed binaries for all components in the infrastructure stack. Each VDC is treated as an immutable artifact that has been validated in staging before being rolled out to production. If an update introduces instability, built-in rollback capabilities allow teams to revert to a known good state with minimal disruption. Because VergeOS integrates AI, it eliminates the need for separate orchestration layers or container clusters. The result is faster time-to-value and a reduced operational burden for platform teams.

Edge AI Requires Vendor-Neutral Acceleration

A common trade-off in edge AI is the choice between predictability and portability. Vendor-integrated stacks, such as those tied to a specific GPU vendor, can simplify lifecycle management. However, they introduce long-term lock-in, creating another reason why edge AI fails. VergeIQ supports heterogeneous accelerators, including NVIDIA, AMD, and other specialized processors—without compromising the ability to manage them consistently. Resource orchestration, clustering, and pooling are handled by VergeOS, allowing AI workloads to run optimally across almost any hardware mix. VergeOS flexibility enables organizations to design hardware strategies that align with business needs, rather than adhering to the vendor’s roadmap.

Abstraction Without Losing Control

Hardware standardization is not always possible in edge environments. The edge must adapt to local constraints, legacy equipment, or specific workload requirements. VergeIQ provides a uniform abstraction layer over diverse hardware, ensuring that AI behaves predictably regardless of the underlying platform. This is not an abstraction for its own sake. It is grounded in a lifecycle-managed infrastructure stack that is versioned, tested, and enforced across the entire deployment footprint. By controlling the infrastructure stack while abstracting its differences, VergeIQ enables both operational consistency and hardware flexibility. StorageSwiss explores the value of this kind of integrated approach to infrastructure in its article, “Why Hyperconverged Infrastructure Needs More Than Just Compute and Storage.”

Why VergeIQ Delivers Where Others Struggle

VergeIQ embodies the principle that infrastructure discipline must come before orchestration. By unifying AI workloads with the same Infrastructure Platform that runs enterprise applications, IT:

  • Standardizes and collapses the infrastructure stack
  • Maintains real-time observability
  • Secures the entire lifecycle
  • Enables portable acceleration strategies

These outcomes transform edge AI from a fragile, site-by-site experiment into a predictable, centrally managed platform that can scale without operational chaos.

See VergeIQ in action.
Join our webinar, “Introducing VergeIQ – Enterprise AI Infrastructure”, to learn how you can simplify, secure, and scale your AI deployments from edge to core.
Register here.

Filed Under: AI Tagged With: , ,