Hyperconverged

by

Ann Arbor, Mich, May 15, 2023 — VergeIO, the Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) company, today announced its inclusion in the 2023-24 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors HCI Software
Solutions Report. The company was awarded placement on this list based
on an evaluation of VergeOS features in the categories of deployment
capabilities, data protection, product and performance management, and
technical support.

VergeIO is a Top 5 HCI Solution

DCIG evaluated 15 software solutions for hyperconverged infrastructure
(HCI) use cases across these four different categories. The report
provides guidance on the TOP 5 Rising Vendors that organizations should
consider for HCI software solutions, including a profile of VergeIO and
the notable features that earned it a DGIG TOP 5 award. The report is
available for free download.

“IT organizations have a number of issues to consider these days, such
as funding challenges, limited resources, management complexity, and
providing IT services at the edge,” writes report author Todd Dorsey,
Senior Storage Analyst at DCIG. “IT leaders look for solutions that
solve problems and provide positive outcomes in many ways. HCI software
fulfills these goals while addressing current IT challenges.”

VergeOS moves beyond legacy HCI configuration with its
ultra-converged infrastructure (UCI), which integrates virtualization,
storage, and networking into a single piece of software. This
integration provides a high degree of efficiency that enables VergeOS to
deliver more performance from existing hardware and a wide range of
scale. VergeOS can scale up to meet the needs of the enterprise and
scale down to fit the constraints of the edge.

UCI provides superior efficiency, performance, simplicity, and scalability

This ability to create a data center operating system from a single
piece of software was among the “Distinguishing Features” listed in the
report for VergeOS, as were the benefits of data center agility and
unified management of disparate clusters. These characteristics were
included with the benefits provided by HCI software, in general, to
offer IT leaders a solution that they can deploy to adapt to the
changing needs of their organization to ensure that they can respond to
new business requirements and opportunities.

A Single Data Center Operating System delivers superior efficiency, performance and scale

“I am thrilled that Verge.IO has been recognized as a DCIG TOP 5 HCI
solution,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “Our goal has always been to
deliver a simple, efficient, and scalable IT infrastructure solution
that is easy to use and provides superior performance and value to our
customers. This recognition is a testament to our team’s hard work and
dedication and the impact that VergeIO is having on our
customers’ businesses.”

Dorsey joins DCIG’s Principal Storage Analyst Ken Clipperton and
VergeIO’s CMO George Crump for a live, 1-hour webinar discussing how to
overcome “The Not So Magnificent Seven Challenges of Small to Medium
Sized Data Centers” on May 24 at 1 p.m. EDT. Part of the event covers
the DCIG evaluation of the 15 HCI/UCI software solutions from the report
and how they narrowed down the list to the DCIG TOP 5 solutions. The
full webinar agenda with a registration link is available here.

About DCIG

The Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG) empowers the IT industry with
actionable analysis. DCIG analysts provide informed third-party analysis
of various cloud, data protection, and data storage technologies. DCIG’s
audiences include C-level executives, IT managers, IT professionals,
magazine editors, bloggers, analysts, and providers within the IT and
cloud service industry.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) company. Unlike
hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), it rotates the traditional IT stack
(compute, storage, and networking) into an integrated data center
operating system, VergeOS. Its efficiency enables greater workload
density on the same hardware with high levels of data resiliency. The
result is dramatically lower costs and greatly simplified IT.

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

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: , , ,

by

As IT budgets tighten, an area to explore is lowering VMware DR costs. The costs to maintain a disaster recovery (DR) process and site add up quickly. Cutting costs, though tempting because it is rarely actually used, may put the organization at risk if a disaster strikes. Fortunately, lowering VMware DR costs does not always have to come with greater risk.

Three Steps to Lowering VMware DR Costs

  1. Lower the cost of the software license
  2. Make more efficient use of the hardware
  3. Expand beyond the DR Use Case

We’ll explain the three steps below and in our upcoming virtual whiteboard session, “VMware Disaster and Ransomware Recovery—The Three NEW Best Practices.“

Lowering VMware DR Software Licensing Costs

The first step is to lower the cost of the software licensing used to replicate and support the remote site infrastructure. Most VMware DR initiatives require a software or hardware solution to replicate the data to the DR site and then a copy of VMware at the DR site to perform testing and host workloads in the event of an actual failure. Reducing the number of solutions the DR process requires and paying less for them without exposing the organization to greater risk will show almost instant savings. These savings increase significantly if the potential solution can run on existing hardware.

Lowering VMware DR costs starts with a cost-efficient solution that is easy to install

VergeIO’s IOprotect is easy to install and seamlessly protects your VMware environment from a disaster or ransomware attack. It typically costs 60% less than the equivalent software from VMware or a third party. There is also just one software package to buy. IOprotect does not require a VMware license at the DR site. Finally, IOprotect runs on your existing hardware, so in most cases, there is no additional hardware to purchase.

The result is a rapid return on investment (ROI). Most customers can install VergeOS onto hardware they already own and begin replicating data from their VMware site in a couple of hours. The time for payback starts immediately, and the investment cost is returned in weeks rather than years.

Make More Efficient Use of Hardware

Because of cost reasons, most organizations have to designate a “select few” workloads for inclusion into the DR process. Each workload they add increases the software licensing and physical hardware requirements at the DR site. In some cases, the storage solution at the DR site will require more capacity, which also means an increase in capacity-based storage licensing. Lowering VMware DR entry costs enable IT to protect more workloads and amortize the investment. Efficiency also extends the life of the hardware, further lowering costs.

IOprotect is integrated into VergeOS, a highly optimized ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) solution. Thanks to its efficiency, the hardware has more resources available, and customers can add additional workloads to the DR process with minimal or no additional cost. VergeOS also includes global inline deduplication, so adding additional workloads does not significantly increase DR site storage requirements. Sometimes, even with the additional workloads, customers can decommission hardware or repurpose it elsewhere in the organization.

Don’t Use The Cloud for Lowering VMware DR Costs

Companies that look to lower VMware costs inevitably look to cloud options. The options often appeal because there are no upfront hardware costs. The problem is that paying monthly for the servers and storage that DR requires adds up quickly. IOprotect, because it uses existing hardware, is a more cost-effective solution, both upfront and especially long-term. With it, you use the hardware you have already paid for, so there is no monthly surprise. Even if you can provision servers on the fly, the storage must be paid for each month.

Lowering VMware DR Costs with More Use Cases

What if you could make your DR process do more? If the software driving that process is efficient, you can do more with the DR process without buying more hardware. The software also has to have the capability to support whatever you define as “more.” Because of the low cost and efficiency of IOprotect, many customers will create an on-premises DR solution using spare servers in addition to the remote DR solution. An on-premises DR solution enables you to recover quickly from disasters that are not site-wide and not have to fail over to another data center. It is ideal for situations like a storage system failure, a rack failure, or even a ransomware attack.

Lowering VMware DR costs can enable IT to expand the use case

With an on-premises or remote DR solution and efficient software, you can expand out of the DR use case and use the solution for Test-Dev, Quality Assurance, and reporting. Some customers leverage VergeIO’s Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology to create a secure instance of their data center for cyber-response training.

The last use case is migrating your production VMware environment to VergeOS, amplifying the cost savings across both use cases, and completing your VMware Exit.

Next Steps

  • Sign Up: for our Video Digital Learning Guide – “Modernizing VMware Disaster Recovery.”
  • Register: for our next virtual whiteboard session – “VMware and Ransomware Recovery—The Three NEW Best Practices.”
  • Read: about creating a VMware Exit Strategy.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With: ,

by

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) catches the attention of many IT professionals, the HCI Disaster Recovery problem, while seldom talked about, could be its greatest weakness. Proper HCI protection and disaster recovery typically require a separate infrastructure with its own software and hardware. This requirement complicates a critical process, creating a high risk of failure while dramatically increasing costs.

What is the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Part of the HCI Disaster Recovery problem is that most data protection solutions have to protect HCI architectures as traditional three-tier architectures. They back up through the hypervisor and to a separate storage system. That separate storage system is often scale-out in nature, so you have nodes backing up nodes.

Disaster recovery requires the same HCI configuration in the remote site as in the primary site. Also, the deduplication capabilities that most HCI vendors provide are bolt-on, which they deliver years after the HCI software first comes to market. As a result, it can’t deduplicate across HCI clusters. If the organization has multiple HCI clusters in one or more locations, it must transmit all the data to the disaster recovery site.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Triples Inefficiency

HCI is incredibly inefficient. The inefficiency is the result of forcing customers to expand with like nodes. If all you need is more processing power, you can’t easily add more advanced CPUs or GPUs to the existing cluster. Even if you use the same processor type, you can’t buy nodes that are primarily processors; you must buy additional storage to match the other nodes in the cluster.

Backing up an HCI architecture, because conventional wisdom is to back up to a scale-out storage system, means you are doubling the inefficiency of the infrastructure. That scale-out backup storage suffers from the same inefficiency as scale-out HCI except in reverse. With scale-out backup storage, you are dragging along, and paying for, more processing power than you probably need just to get capacity.

Making sure an HCI architecture is protected from disaster triples its inefficiency. Forcing identical nodes in the disaster recovery site means that the HCI solution duplicates the same inefficiency at the disaster recovery site as in the primary location. Suppose you are replicating the backup infrastructure in addition to the HCI infrastructure because you don’t trust HCI replication. In that case, you are quadrupling the cost of data protection and disaster recovery costs.

The HCI Ransomware Recovery Problem

Ransomware is another form of disaster. It is unique in that the data center is still operational, but users and applications are not. HCI also has a ransomware recovery problem. HCI solutions do not harden their software. Since most are mostly Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions that claim to be HCI, they run as a virtual machine (VM) within a hypervisor like VMware or Hyper-V. They are at the mercy of that hypervisor’s ransomware hardening.

Running storage as a VM castrates a vital line of ransomware defense, snapshots. Recovering quickly from a ransomware attack requires frequent, immutable snapshots. Given the latest ransomware attack profiles, IT must retain these snapshots for months. Storage running as a VM suffers from the same virtualization tax as other VMs. As a result, they can only keep a few snapshots before needing to expel them for performance reasons.

Solving the HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

Solving the HCI disaster recovery problem requires rethinking HCI. First, the IT stack (compute, storage, networking) needs to be integrated, not layers. At VergeIO, we call this rotating the stack, which removes the layers and creates a cohesive data center operating system (DCOS), VergeOS. It is a single piece of software, not dozens. We call it Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Next week we’ll be hosting a live webinar that compares HCI to UCI. Register here.

Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery problem with replication, snapshots and deduplication.
Solve The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem

While we support external backup applications, VergeOS includes built-in data protection and replication capabilities. They, like everything else, are integrated into the core code, so they operate with minimal overhead. You can execute immutable snapshots frequently and retain those snapshots indefinitely without impacting performance.

VergeOS also supports different node types, so the disaster recovery site can use different hardware than the primary. Also, VergeOS supports global, inline deduplication so that if you are replicating from multiple sites to a central disaster recovery location, it only replicates the unique data from each site. With VergeOS, transfers are fast, and disaster recovery storage costs are negligible.

The HCI Disaster Recovery Problem Creates Compromise

Because of cost and complexity, many organizations compromise when establishing their disaster recovery site. The enforcement of like hardware doubles server acquisition costs, and the lack of efficient data storage can triple or more storage costs.

The most common compromise is using the backup infrastructure as the disaster recovery solution. Backup software can replicate and even deduplicate data, but when it stores that data on the remote site, it is in the backup software’s format. It isn’t operational. If there is a disaster, the organization must wait, potentially days or hours, for restore job completion before allowing access.

Using backup as the disaster recovery solution also makes testing and practicing the recovery process much more complicated and time-consuming. The result is less frequent testing and no practice. The reason most disaster recoveries fail is a lack of testing and experience.

Eliminating Disaster Recovery Compromise

VergeOS provides no-compromise disaster recovery. The costs at the disaster recovery site are easily controlled thanks to node flexibility and data deduplication. The data at the DR site is live and ready to instantiate at a moment’s notice.

Networking is also a source of disaster recovery failures. Misconfigurations, improper remapping, and incompatible hardware between locations can cause many problems. VergeOS integrates software-defined networking and alleviates these problems, ensuring that newly recovered data centers are easily accessible by users and applications.

Testing, thanks to our snapshot functionality, is also easy. Thanks to our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, a snapshot of an entire data center can be made in seconds. That snapshot can then be mounted for recovery testing purposes. Deduplication ensures that the only growth in capacity is changes made to the disaster recovery dataset while the test is executing.

Data protection and disaster recovery have been problematic since the dawn of the data center. Continuing to try the same old thing (replace backup software, replace backup storage, try to find a better replication solution, pray the network works) isn’t the answer. With VergeOS, we start at the source of the problem the production infrastructure itself.

Learn More:

  1. Register for our live webinar, “Beyond HCI — The Next Step in Data Center Infrastructure Evolution.” During the webinar, VergeIO’s Principal Systems Engineer, Aaron Reed, and I will compare HCI and UCI in-depth. I’m even going to talk Aaron into giving you a live demonstration of the solution of VergeOS in action.
  2. Subscribe to our Digital Learning Guide, “Does HCI Really Deliver?”
  3. Sign-up for a Test Drive – Try it yourself, and run our software in your labs.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , , ,

by

For data centers, realizing the full value of scale requires a single infrastructure that can scale in multiple dimensions and address multiple use cases. Customers today can select a legacy, single-dimension, scale-out strategy like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). However, they then experience scale-out sprawl because they need a scale-out architecture for production applications, a scale-out architecture for unstructured data, and a scale-out architecture for data protection. These designs will never enable customers to benefit from the full value of scale.

As we discussed in our on-demand webinar, “How to Eliminate the Data Center Scale Problem,”, the solution is a single infrastructure, not multiple infrastructures. That infrastructure must scale in all three dimensions, not just “out.” It also must allow incremental adoption because most organizations won’t “clean sweep” their data centers.

The Full Value of Scaling Large Instead of Out

While hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors claim to scale out, most customers find that they, for technical or practical reasons, can only “scale medium.” Despite claiming to converge virtualization, networking, and storage, most HCI solutions are software-defined storage (SDS) running as a virtual machine (VM). They are stacking the three tiers (compute, storage, networking) instead of converging them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Enterprise

For virtualization, these products typically force you to pay separately for a third-party hypervisor like VMware ESXi, or bundle an open-source version, with little to no optimization. When it comes to networking, most HCI solutions provide little to no functionality and instead rely on the often limited capabilities of the hypervisor. The result of borrowing and bundling code creates a burden on the infrastructure, which worsens as IT adds additional nodes. IT professionals refer to this overhead as the virtualization tax. As a result, most HCI infrastructures only support one workload and don’t typically scale that architecture beyond six to eight nodes.

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), instead of stacking layers of code on top of each other within each node, rotates the stack into a single layer, creating a cohesive piece of data center operating software. VergeOS, for example, is a UCI solution architected so that virtualization, networking services, and storage services are all integrated, almost eliminating the virtualization tax. UCI’s efficiency can scale to hundreds of nodes without wasting resources so that even the largest enterprise can consolidate all their workloads onto a single infrastructure.

Scaling large helps organizations realize the full value of scale by enabling organizations to keep the same infrastructure no matter how many new workloads the organization needs to support. It simplifies IT operations and dramatically lowers IT cost.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering The Edge

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering the Edge

Only some organizations need massive scale, and even enterprises that do will have Edge locations and branch offices that need localized IT resources. Scaling small is a more significant challenge than scaling large. Mid-size data centers and branch offices often have a smaller IT team, sometimes a team of one. Edge locations are hard to get to and have an IT team of zero. In all cases, space is often limited, but high availability is often a mandate.

The “scale medium” HCI solutions often require three nodes. Overcoming the overhead caused by the virtualization tax requires that those nodes have powerful processors and high-performance storage, even though compute and storage performance requirements are modest. Mid-range processors and a mixture of flash and hard disk drives will meet the requirements of many of these environments. The legacy HCI node-similarity requirement forces customers into using high-end processors and flash-only configurations. The result is that HCI becomes very expensive for Server Rooms and Edge Computing.

UCI can scale small. IT can create a cluster with only one or two small nodes for high availability (H/A). The efficiency of VergeOS enables Edge Computing, especially when IT planners couple it with two mini-servers like Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC). In the space of a shoebox, you can deliver Edge Computing power and consume less than 12 watts, and delivers more than enough performance for multiple workloads.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering for Mid-sized data centers

For the Server Room use case, VergeOS can use two or three low-end to midrange servers, enabling you to consolidate all your workloads onto one infrastructure, eliminating dozens of extraneous software packages and processes.

Scaling small helps organizations realize the full value of scale by reducing the cost and complexity of managing Edge Compute. It also enables mid-sized data centers to keep pace with larger organizations even though they have much smaller IT teams. Whether you have hundreds of Edge data collection points or are an IT team of one, VergeOS can solve your virtualization, storage, networking, and data protection challenges.

The Value of Scaling Vertical

Vertically scaling your infrastructure is one of the essential requirements to realizing the full value of scale, but it is often lacking from HCI solutions. Most HCI solutions require that each additional node added to the cluster has similar processing power, IOPS performance, and storage capacity as the existing nodes. While it is true that some HCI vendors have a concept of a capacity node, that node often comes with ramifications. One vendor, for example, suggests turning off deduplication if you add a set of capacity nodes, which means you will need even more of them.

The Full Value of Scale: Delivering Workload Consolidation

Node similarity leads IT professionals only to use HCI for one specific workload. UCI is different in that it can support multiple nodes within the data center operating system (DCOS). A single environment can contain nodes with different processing capabilities from different manufacturers. It can even mix in nodes with Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Nodes can be storage performance focused with NVMe flash, and other nodes can be capacity focused with high-density but low-cost hard disk drives.

The mixture of nodes does not increase complexity. IT can organize nodes by their capabilities into specific clusters. The clusters are then seen through our Global Resource Pool. Using our Virtual Data Center (VDC) technology, an IT administrator can dedicate certain cluster types to particular VDCs, or the capabilities of a cluster can be made universally available to all VDCs. This is all easily done through the VergeOS dashboard.

A VDCs can be created for each workload type or set of workloads with a common resource requirement. For example, suppose you have a mission-critical performance-demanding application. In that case, the infrastructure must deliver consistent, high-performance; you can dedicate the resources from a specific high-performance storage cluster (NVMe Flash) to that VDC. The VDC can even be nested so that you can have a production instance, a development instance, and a QA instance of that application. Our deduplication and snapshots make this nesting practical because they eliminate redundant data.

The vertical dimension also helps organizations realize the full value of scale by doing something they may have thought impossible, complete workload consolidation. When looking at workload or even storage consolidation, IT planners worry about workload integrity, ensuring the workload will get the performance or capacity it needs when needed. With UCI, you can mix nodes and add specific resources for specific workloads ensuring consistent performance and happy users.

The Full Value of Scale: Deep

Scaling Deep is another dimension data centers need to extract the full value of scale. It ensures existing resources are almost entirely utilized before adding more nodes. While scaling large is vital, you only want to scale as large as you must and no further.

Scaling deep requires ensuring the vendor optimizes the software for the hardware it is managing. Delivering optimization while maintaining hardware abstraction requires very talented developers. It also needs to provide features like deduplication to ensure capacity efficiency. These optimizations require that the UCI vendor own the code and can get into the low levels of the software to make those optimizations. Vendors who borrow an off-the-shelf or open-source hypervisor don’t own the code to make the improvements if they want.

VergeIO’s developers have taken talent and ownership to an extreme. VergeIO not only owns the code and has very talented developers, and we created a specific programming language and development environment to get around the limitations of traditional programming stacks. It enables us to remain agile, even 12 years into the product’s maturity.

Scaling deeps helps organizations realize the full value of scale so they can slow the growth of IT spending. Most HCI solutions are less than 10% utilized, but these vendors continue to force their customers to add additional nodes to cover the virtualization tax.

How to Get from Many to One

Clearly, scale-out is not enough; data centers need the multi-dimensional scale that UCI provides. The vision of UCI is compelling, one data center operating system that replaces dozens of others while driving down the cost and complexity of IT.

Starting is simple, identify one workload whose infrastructure needs refreshing. Maybe it’s time to replace a SAN or NAS, or you are considering HCI and are looking for a more cost-effective and scalable alternative. Maybe you are a member of a small IT team with a small data center and are looking to simplify everything. Or You have an Edge Strategy that has stalled or never got off the ground.

You can also get an in-depth education into the VergeOS architecture with our Digital Learning Guide, “Understanding the VergeOS Architecture.“

All of these are great places to start with VergeIO. Want to learn how UCI can map into your infrastructure plans? Schedule a meeting with one of our technical specialists today.

Filed Under: HCI Tagged With: , , ,