Storage

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Comparing VMware Alternative Storage

As part of a VMware exit, comparing the VMware alternative storage capabilities is as important as selecting an alternative hypervisor for the organization’s future infrastructure software. Organizations typically examine Nutanix’s Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) architecture against VergeIO’s integrated VergeFS storage within VergeOS. Although both approaches virtualize SAN functionality onto the same servers, creating a virtual SAN (vSAN), the two designs differ. These differences impact resource utilization, operational complexity, stability, and costs.

Understanding vSAN Resource Efficiency

Nutanix employs a storage-as-a-VM architecture using a dedicated CVM running on each node. This CVM consumes substantial resources—between 16GB and 32GB of RAM or more, alongside multiple virtual CPUs (up to 22 vCPUs per node). This significant resource footprint reduces available capacity for production workloads, driving higher infrastructure costs and decreasing resource efficiency, particularly in smaller environments.

VergeIO integrates storage directly into VergeOS via its VergeFS file system, eliminating the need for dedicated controller VMs. This integration ensures more node resources remain available for production workloads, improving resource efficiency without requiring additional hardware investments.

Sizing and Stability of vSAN Alternatives

Sizing complexities are inherent in Nutanix’s CVM-based model. Determining the ideal CVM size is critical yet challenging. Undersized CVMs lead to bottlenecks or instability, while oversized CVMs consume unnecessary resources. Nutanix users sometimes experience stability issues such as random CVM reboots, leading to a reactive response rather than root-cause analysis from support teams.

VergeIO’s integrated storage approach within the OS kernel eliminates these sizing complexities, providing predictable and stable performance without the risk of bottlenecks or instability. This inherent stability reduces operational overhead, making VergeIO a reliable VMware alternative with minimal administrative intervention.

Understanding vSAN: Performance

Comparing VMware Alternative Storage

When under load or insufficiently resourced, Nutanix’s CVMs negatively impact VM performance on the same node, leading to broader performance degradation across the cluster. VergeIO’s integrated approach ensures stable and consistent resource utilization, avoiding disruptions and translating directly into improved cluster reliability and responsiveness.

VergeIO consistently publishes detailed performance benchmarks, demonstrating VergeOS’s real-world capabilities. Nutanix, in contrast, has provided minimal transparency regarding vSAN performance. While no benchmark perfectly represents every customer scenario, VergeIO’s results offer valuable insights.

Recent VergeOS performance benchmarks show impressive outcomes, including over 1.5 million read IOPS, 23 GB/s throughput on a 25 GB/s network, and realistic 64k block sizes at less than one penny per IOPS. Independent testing by StorageReview demonstrated VergeOS handling 1,000 virtual desktops booting in 71 seconds. These benchmarks substantiate VergeIO’s superior performance and transparency claims compared to Nutanix.

Management and Troubleshooting a VMware Alternative

Nutanix’s separate CVM introduces additional management complexity, requiring administrators to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot an extra software layer. Issues such as CVM reboots or resource contention complicate troubleshooting, increasing operational burdens.

By removing the separate CVM layer, VergeOS simplifies operations. Administrators gain straightforward monitoring, simplified diagnostics, and faster issue resolution, all integrated transparently within VergeOS.

Understanding vSAN Controller Resiliency

A key consideration when comparing the VMware alternative storage capabilities is how the solution handles resiliency. Nutanix promotes its distributed “leader” CVM architecture, allowing any node to assume cluster leadership. However, this approach offers limited practical advantage, as additional leader nodes beyond simultaneous node failure tolerance are redundant. Nutanix clusters configured with RF3 can survive two simultaneous node failures, reducing the practical value of additional leaders.

VergeIO’s ioGuardian provides redundancy and resilience beyond traditional N+2 redundancy. While conventional three-way mirroring (N+2) continuously replicates data across three nodes, ioGuardian enhances protection by maintaining an independent, deduplicated third copy, stored separately from the primary mirrored dataset. This highly available backup replaces traditional backups and becomes integral to your continuous availability strategy.

IoGuardian seamlessly and transparently serves data back to the production environment in real time during multi-node or multi-drive failures, even exceeding two nodes. Affected virtual machines instantly retrieve the necessary data from the ioGuardian storage, eliminating downtime and ensuring uninterrupted operations without manual intervention or complex recovery workflows.

Combining immediate real-time data availability, reduced infrastructure overhead, and simplified management, ioGuardian substantially surpasses the protection and operational simplicity achievable with standard N+2 redundancy approaches.

How a vSAN Impacts TCO

Nutanix’s CVMs impact total cost of ownership (TCO) beyond licensing. They require substantial resources, necessitating larger hardware configurations, increasing capital expenditures, and increasing ongoing licensing expenses.

In contrast, VergeIO’s integrated VergeFS reduces the software footprint, simplifies licensing with straightforward per-server pricing, and optimizes existing or commodity hardware. This approach considerably lowers infrastructure costs, positioning VergeIO as a cost-effective VMware alternative storage solution.

Summary of VergeOS Advantages

Comparing VMware alternative storage capabilities reveals that VergeIO’s integration of VergeFS into VergeOS provides significant practical advantages over Nutanix’s CVM-based storage model. It maximizes resource efficiency, ensures consistent and reliable performance, simplifies management, and reduces infrastructure and licensing costs. These combined advantages position VergeIO as an attractive VMware alternative storage solution, ideal for organizations seeking efficiency, stability, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness.

To further explore VMware alternative data availability and see these considerations in action, join our upcoming VergeIO webinar. Our experts will provide an in-depth comparison of hyperconverged and ultraconverged architectures, highlighting performance benchmarks, operational simplicity, and cost-efficiency. Register now to ensure your infrastructure decisions align with your organization’s strategic priorities.

Our latest white paper, “HCI Data Availability Analysis,” delves into the crucial issue of maintaining availability in Hyperconverged and Ultraconverged architectures by comparing how Nutanix and VergeIO ensure data access during hardware failures.

Filed Under: HCI Tagged With: , ,

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Solving VDI Boot Storms is the number one requirement to driving Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) adoption. VDI has become essential for organizations supporting remote workforces, educational institutions, healthcare providers, and engineering firms. However, despite its advantages, VDI deployments frequently face significant storage challenges—especially during boot storms.

Why Do VDI Boot Storms Occur?

Boot storms happen when many virtual desktops simultaneously boot up or log in, causing a sudden surge of storage activity. Traditional storage architectures, including most virtual SAN (vSAN) solutions, struggle to handle these simultaneous I/O demands, resulting in significant latency and reduced performance.

The vSAN Bottleneck

Although vSANs are appealing for their potential cost savings, their architecture typically relies on running storage as an application inside a virtual machine (VM) under the control of the hypervisor. This additional software layer introduces significant overhead and performance inefficiencies, particularly under heavy workloads like a boot storm.

Examples of this approach include VMware vSAN and Nutanix AOS Storage. This architecture involves multiple steps for each storage request:

Solving VDI Boot Storms
  1. The application VM sends an I/O request to the hypervisor.
  2. The hypervisor routes the request to the storage VM.
  3. The storage VM processes the request and communicates back to the hypervisor.
  4. The hypervisor delivers the response back to the application VM.

This multi-step interaction introduces latency, increases hypervisor dependency, and degrades overall performance, especially during intensive scenarios like boot storms. Moreover, vSAN-based solutions require storage VMs to frequently coordinate metadata and resiliency across nodes, creating additional network load and complexity.

The Scale Problem

Boot storms are particularly problematic in environments with hundreds or thousands of virtual desktops booting simultaneously. Each desktop generates a surge of storage I/O requests that must be processed in real-time. In large VDI environments, this I/O demand can overwhelm vSAN-based systems, leading to:

  • Slow login times, with users experiencing delays of 2-5 minutes when starting their desktops.
  • Unresponsive applications, as latency spikes impact application launch times and in-session performance.
  • Infrastructure strain, as overloaded storage controllers and network congestion slow down overall system responsiveness.

Imagine this I/O back-and-forth between the virtual desktop, the hypervisor, and the storage VM happening 1,000 times per second while hundreds of virtual desktops are simultaneously booting. Even all-flash vSAN solutions cannot eliminate this inefficiency, as the multi-layered architecture and the need for metadata synchronization across nodes still constrain them.

The High Cost of Solving VDI Boot Storms with AFAs

Due to these limitations, many organizations resort to dedicated all-flash arrays (AFA) to handle the storage-intensive nature of boot storms. While AFAs improve performance, they significantly raise the cost per desktop, making VDI a much more expensive proposition. A storage infrastructure that should enable cost savings instead becomes one of the biggest budget concerns for IT teams.

For a more detailed breakdown of vSAN limitations and how they impact performance, read the whitepaper:
Understanding vSAN Limitations in High-Demand Environments

The Problem with Deduplication and RAID in VDI

Many storage solutions use deduplication and RAID for efficiency and data protection. However, these technologies introduce additional challenges during boot storms.

  • Deduplication Bottlenecks: Deduplication optimizes storage by reducing redundant data blocks. However, during a boot storm, hundreds of virtual desktops simultaneously access the same deduplicated blocks, creating a bottleneck. A single storage controller is forced to serve thousands of requests from the same physical block, leading to I/O contention and severe performance degradation.
  • RAID Parity Overhead: Traditional RAID architectures, particularly RAID 5 and RAID 6, use parity calculations to provide data protection. These calculations add substantial processing overhead. During a boot storm, the storage system must handle thousands of simultaneous read operations, forcing RAID controllers to decode parity data rapidly. This not only slows boot times but also creates an imbalance in read/write workloads.

These factors make traditional storage solutions fundamentally unfit for high-scale VDI environments.

Introducing VergeFS: A Better Approach

Solving VDI boot storms requires a highly integrated, performance-oriented storage solution to effectively overcome these challenges. VergeFS, integrated directly into VergeOS, offers a compelling alternative to traditional vSAN architectures and avoids the high cost per desktop of dedicated all-flash arrays. Unlike typical vSAN solutions that require additional software layers or dedicated storage hardware, VergeFS is built directly into VergeOS, eliminating unnecessary overhead and complexity.

Solving VDI Boot Storms with VergeFS

VergeFS’s integrated architecture ensures exceptionally efficient I/O handling, allowing it to handle boot storms seamlessly. It achieves bare-metal-level performance by simplifying data paths, eliminating the overhead commonly associated with external storage arrays, vSANs, or complex RAID configurations.

  • Integrated Storage and Compute: VergeFS and the hypervisor runs within the same code base, eliminating the need for separate storage VMs and removing unnecessary I/O hops.
  • Efficient I/O Distribution: Instead of centralizing I/O requests to a storage VM, VergeFS distributes them across multiple storage nodes, allowing the entire infrastructure to handle storage loads efficiently.
  • Efficient Deduplication: Integrated within the same code base as VergeOS, it enhances all facets of the infrastructure and incurs immeasurable additional overhead due to sharing identical metadata.
  • No RAID Bottlenecks: VergeFS replaces RAID parity calculations with a distributed mirroring approach, significantly reducing latency and improving boot performance.

The Advantages of VergeOS Deduplication

VergeOS eliminates the deduplication issue by integrating it natively within the core of its architecture. Because VergeFS and VergeOS share a common code base, deduplication is not a bolted-on feature or post-processing task—it is part of the storage fabric itself. Metadata used for deduplication is the same metadata leveraged for managing the file system and data distribution, incurring negligible overhead. This efficient design enables VergeFS to deliver the capacity-saving benefits of deduplication without compromising I/O performance during even the most demanding boot storms.

Solving VDI Boot Storms with Distributed Mirroring

One of VergeFS’s key advantages is its use of distributed mirroring, enabling multiple drives to feed data requests simultaneously. Unlike RAID configurations that require parity decoding, distributed mirroring directly serves data from multiple mirrored copies across storage drives, drastically reducing latency and increasing throughput during intensive I/O operations.

Additionally, VergeOS’ integrated deduplication offsets the capacity penalty common with other mirrored data protection models. This means IT teams get the benefits of high-performance mirroring without excessive storage overhead.

Real-World Results with VergeFS

Solving VDI boot storms with VergeFS has been independently verified by reputable third parties and at customer deployments. These proof points demonstrate the significant performance advantages of VergeFS.

  • Storage Review Validation: Independent testing by Storage Review confirmed that VergeOS, leveraging VergeFS, successfully booted 1,000 virtual machines in under 70 seconds—far beyond what is possible with traditional vSAN architectures.
  • 6X Faster than VMware and Omnissa: CCSI, a Desktop-as-a-Service provider and VergeIO customer, found that virtual desktops running on VergeFS booted up to six times faster compared to equivalent environments using VMware Horizon or Omnissa.

This real-world validation shows that VergeFS delivers tangible performance benefits that translate directly into improved user experience and reduced IT overhead.

The Cost Advantage

By eliminating costly add-ons like AFAs, reducing hardware requirements, and removing RAID-based performance bottlenecks, VergeFS significantly lowers the cost per virtual desktop. A VergeFS deployment is 10X less expensive than using a dedicated AFA. IT teams can scale VDI deployments more affordably while maintaining high-performance standards.

For more insights into choosing the right VDI infrastructure, download the whitepaper:
Choosing The Right Alternative to VMware Horizon and Citrix for VDI Solutions.

Conclusion

Organizations facing VDI storage challenges, especially boot storms, should strongly consider solutions designed explicitly for efficiency and performance. VergeFS, fully integrated into VergeOS, provides a proven alternative to traditional VDI storage architectures, ensuring rapid, predictable boot performance even under heavy load conditions.

By adopting VergeFS, IT teams can eliminate RAID bottlenecks, reduce complexity, avoid the high cost of dedicated all-flash storage and eliminate future storage refreshes, all while delivering a seamless user experience.

Learn more by attending our live webinar:
Register for the VDI Alternatives Webinar on March 27, 2025

Filed Under: VDI Tagged With: , ,

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

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

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

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

Challenges with Previous Virtualized SAN Solutions

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

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

Why Lancaster Chose VergeIO

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

Additional factors that influenced Lancaster’s decision included:

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

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

Seamless Migration and Immediate Benefits

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

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

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

Comparing vSAN Alternatives: Free Expert Webinar

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

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

Webinar Details

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

🔗 Learn More and Register

About Lancaster Central School District

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

About VergeIO

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

For more information, visit www.verge.io.

Media Contact

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

Filed Under: Press Release Tagged With: , , ,

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

Understanding vSAN Snapshot Limitations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding vSAN Snapshots Macro Protection Capabilities

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

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

How VergeIO Enables Macro Protection

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

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

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

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

Understanding vSAN Snapshots

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

Get Macro Protection, Move Beyond VM-Only Granularity

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

Understanding vSAN Snapshots: Free Expert Webinar

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

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

Webinar Details

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

🔗 Learn More & Register

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , , ,

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The ROI of High-Performance HCI would be a compelling alternative to the high cost of dedicated All-Flash Arrays. However, as application performance demands increase, many HCI solutions struggle to deliver the required performance, scalability, and efficiency. Legacy HCI solutions struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern mainstream applications, let alone today’s high-performance applications. The result is that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which has long promised simplification and cost savings, has never delivered on this promise.

The ROI of High-Performance HCI is achieved only when these platforms meet the demands of today’s workloads. Applications such as virtual desktops and databases require high performance and low latency—capabilities that many legacy HCI platforms fail to provide due to architectural inefficiencies.

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) is High-Performance HCI

the ROI of high-performance HCI

UCI is the next evolution in data center software, designed to overcome the limitations of legacy HCI by deeply integrating virtualization, storage, and networking into a single codebase. Unlike traditional HCI, where storage is often a second-class citizen running as a virtual machine, UCI treats storage as a first-class service, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization. By addressing these challenges head-on, UCI solutions like VergeOS deliver superior performance and unparalleled ROI.

Want to learn more? Register for VergeIO’s upcoming webinar to see these high-performance results live on cost-effective hardware:
👉 Live Demonstration: Break the Performance Shackles of HCI

Eliminating Expensive Storage Hardware

UCI improves the ROI of high-performance HCI by eliminating expensive dedicated storage controller hardware and vendor-marked-up storage media, which can cost up to 10 times more than off-the-shelf consumer-grade SSDs. These enterprise-class drives are designed with features like capacitors and error-correcting code (ECC) to ensure data integrity, but they significantly inflate infrastructure costs.

Legacy All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) and HCI solutions depend heavily on these specialized components because they rely on the hardware for data resiliency and verification. In contrast, UCI solutions like VergeOS integrate these functions into the software, ensuring data resiliency and integrity without depending on expensive, proprietary hardware. This software-first mentality also enables UCI platforms to mix hardware from different vendors and generations, providing greater flexibility for organizations to scale and upgrade their infrastructure without forklift overhauls.

Matching and Surpassing All-Flash Array Features

Maintaining UCI’s improvements to the ROI of high-performance HCI requires that UCI platforms like VergeOS match and surpass the feature set of traditional all-flash arrays. Enterprises have come to expect capabilities such as:

the ROI of high-performance HCI
  • Unlimited snapshots without performance degradation: VergeOS supports instant snapshots without impacting IOPS or latency, allowing IT teams to back up and restore data seamlessly. VergeOS snapshots go beyond traditional snapshots because they are actually deduplicated clones, providing independence and scalability between snapshot generations.
  • Global Inline Deduplication: VergeOS performs global inline deduplication without slowing down I/O operations, enabling organizations to maximize storage efficiency without sacrificing performance. Unlike most deduplication technologies, which are added as an afterthought to the software and introduce latency, VergeOS’s deduplication was integrated from day one and has no noticeable impact on performance. Global deduplication also makes disaster recovery data transfers more efficient by reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent, particularly in many-to-one disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Replication to remote sites: Built-in replication ensures data can be efficiently copied to offsite locations, supporting robust disaster recovery strategies. When combined with VergeOS Virtual Data Centers, which encapsulate the entire data center, replication provides a simple and comprehensive solution for failover and recovery.

Traditionally associated with high-end storage arrays, these features are fully integrated into VergeOS’s UCI platform. By providing these capabilities within a consolidated, software-driven solution, VergeOS simplifies operations and delivers unmatched value.

High Performance with Low Latency

A critical challenge to improving the ROI of high-performance HCI is delivering high performance while maintaining low latency. Many HCI platforms struggle under demanding workloads because they must balance virtual machine and storage responsibilities within the same infrastructure. UCI, by contrast, is architected to ensure resource optimization and eliminate contention. When storage performance demands are extreme, VergeOS can even dedicate servers to specific functions, i.e., compute-only, GPU-only, and storage-only nodes.

By treating storage as a first-class service within its hypervisor, VergeOS achieves consistently low latency and sub-millisecond response times, even under heavy load. This deep integration allows VergeOS to allocate resources intelligently, ensuring that both compute and storage operations run smoothly without interference. Whether running I/O-intensive workloads or supporting mission-critical applications, VergeOS delivers the performance and responsiveness needed to keep pace with future demands.

Real-World Proof: VergeOS in Action

The advantages of UCI ROI versus the ROI of high-performance HCI are best demonstrated through real-world testing. Recently, VergeIO published a benchmark showcasing the performance of VergeOS under demanding workloads. The test utilized eight servers costing less than $1,500 per node, demonstrating that high performance does not require high-cost infrastructure. Key results included:

  • 1.5 Million+ Read IOPS using 64K blocks
  • 24 GB/s of Write Throughput on a 25 GB/s network

It’s worth noting that VergeOS achieved these results using 64K block sizes, which provide a more realistic representation of enterprise workloads compared to the more commonly benchmarked 4K blocks. Again, these tests were performed on off-the-shelf servers configured well below the typical data center-class server.

Want to see these results live? Join VergeIO’s upcoming webinar to learn how VergeOS delivers high performance on affordable hardware:
👉 Want to See UCI Outperform an AFA? Join us for a Live Demonstration

Conclusion: UCI Delivers The ROI of High-performance HCI

With UCI solutions like VergeOS, the ROI of High-Performance HCI is no longer a theoretical concept but a practical reality. By eliminating the dependency on expensive hardware, matching and surpassing the capabilities of traditional storage arrays, and delivering consistent low-latency performance, VergeOS enables organizations to meet the demands of modern workloads without breaking their budgets.

the ROI of high-performance HCI

UCI represents the logical evolution of infrastructure software, combining the simplicity of HCI with the performance and flexibility enterprises require. For organizations looking to consolidate operations, reduce costs, and scale efficiently, UCI is the path forward.

Filed Under: HCI Tagged With: ,

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IT professionals who’ve attempted to architect a high-performance vSAN often hit a brick wall. No matter how many nodes and how much network bandwidth they build into their design, they face poor utilization and high latency. As a result, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is pigeonholed into specific use cases, like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and fails to be deployed broadly across the enterprise. This siloing of HCI defeats its primary purpose: consolidating and simplifying data center operations. A high vSAN performance is essential for organizations to realize the promise of HCI.

a High-Performance vSAN

The challenge is further compounded because high-performance storage I/O is no longer limited to specialized use cases. It has become a requirement for modern workloads. What was once considered high performance is now the baseline, pushing organizations to scale storage I/O performance to meet evolving application demands. Yet, HCI struggles to deliver, forcing businesses to rely on expensive dedicated storage arrays even for workloads that require mainstream performance. A dedicated storage array is 10X the price of the equivalent capacity in a vSAN, if the vSAN can deliver the required performance. Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) bridges this gap, delivering the promised simplicity of HCI while addressing its limitations.

Why HCI Can’t Deliver a High-Performance vSAN

HCI promises to simplify IT infrastructure by combining virtualization, storage, and networking into a single solution. However, beneath the surface, it relies on separate software components hidden behind a graphical user interface. This fragmented design introduces inefficiencies, with storage operating as a virtual machine (VM) within the hypervisor. As a result, storage competes for resources with other VMs, leading to higher latency, lower efficiency, and underutilization of available bandwidth.

HCI comes with strict hardware requirements, further limiting its flexibility. Strict hardware requirements lead to higher upfront hardware costs and make scaling the infrastructure more complex because nodes have to match or be close in configuration to the previous set of nodes. Over time, it becomes difficult to find modern server hardware that matches four- or five-year-old servers. The result is that customers must refresh the entire cluster in one big forklift upgrade—despite HCI initially promising “no more forklift upgrades.”

How UCI Solves the High-Performance vSAN Problem

Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) addresses the inherent inefficiencies of HCI by integrating storage, virtualization, and networking into a unified architecture. Unlike HCI, which depends on separate components, UCI leverages a single, optimized codebase that eliminates resource contention and improves performance.

a High-Performance vSAN

VergeOS, the leading UCI platform, delivers consistent, scalable performance without requiring proprietary hardware or additional storage arrays. During our upcoming webinar, we will demonstrate this high-performance live so you can see it yourself. VergeOS provides complete hardware flexibility, enabling organizations to mix nodes with different processing and storage capacities. This flexibility allows businesses to scale incrementally, avoiding the costly and disruptive forklift upgrades associated with HCI.

Proof that UCI Delivers

In tests done with Solidigm, VergeIO was able to prove the capabilities of its vSAN:

  • 1 Million+ IOPS at 30 GB/s Throughput: Using 64K block sizes, VergeOS demonstrated over one million random read IOPS with sub-millisecond latency, addressing the needs of performance-critical workloads.
  • 12 GB/s Write Throughput: VergeOS delivered 195,000 random write IOPS, maximizing the bandwidth of a 25Gbps network connection while maintaining low response times.
  • An eight-node cluster built using $1,500 servers achieved over a million IOPS at a cost per IOPS of just 0.67 cents, making high-performance storage accessible to organizations of all sizes.

The Importance of 64K Block Sizes

Testing with 64K block sizes provides a more accurate representation of real-world virtualized environments, where larger block sizes are commonly used for storage I/O. Traditional 4K block tests measure raw storage device performance, but they fail to capture the demands of virtualized workloads, which include virtual machines, databases, and large-file applications. By utilizing 64K blocks in testing, VergeOS showcases its ability to handle these real-world demands while maintaining exceptional performance metrics, making it an ideal solution for enterprise environments.

Conclusion: a High-Performance vSAN You Can Afford

Modern applications require infrastructure that scales both performance and affordability. While HCI struggles with the demands of today’s workloads, UCI fulfills the promise of a unified, high-performance platform. VergeOS combines optimized performance with flexibility, enabling organizations to handle any mainstream or high-performance workload without expensive, proprietary hardware.

With VergeOS, IT leaders can consolidate their infrastructure, reduce costs, and scale their performance to meet growing demands. To see VergeOS in action and learn more about these results, join our upcoming webinar for a live demonstration. It’s time to move beyond the limitations of HCI and unlock the full potential of UCI.

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