Lancaster Central School District Selects VergeIO

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 de-dupe, snapshot performance, and resiliency. Lancaster’s IT team evaluated multiple virtualization solutions in search of a more cost-effective and performing 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,” said Eric Miller, manager of information services, Lancaster Central School District.

Challenges with Previous Virtualized SAN Solutions 

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 de-dupe, 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. Unlike other virtualization solutions, VergeIO directly integrates storage into the hypervisor, 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 de-dupe: 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,” said Tim Johnson, systems administrator, Lancaster Central School District.

Seamless Migration and Immediate Benefits
Lancaster deployed VergeIO in May 2024 as a PoC 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’ global de-dupe
• 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,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO.

Comparing vSAN Alternatives: Free Expert Webinar
For IT professionals facing similar challenges, VergeIO is hosting a live webinar on February 19, 2024 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT featuring storage and virtualization expert Marc Staimer and VergeIO’s CMO 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.