VMblog spoke with Yan Ness, the CEO of Verge.io, discussing the easiest way to run workloads anywhere and how his company is leapfrogging convergence. 

Yan Ness:  We are a software company that leapfrogged hyper converged infrastructure and re-wrote the entire IT stack as one single powerful, tiny piece of software that runs on commodity x86 hardware. It's ideal for workloads that can't run in the cloud or that customers want on-premise.   It replaces a SAN, hypervisor, network, firewall, automation and monitoring. Our self-monitoring and self-healing mean customers get more out of their hardware for longer. 

VMblog:  What's unique about Verge.io?

Ness:  It's the simplest, easiest way to run workloads anywhere. At only 300,000 lines of code, and with 2-3 x the functionality of other HCI or legacy solutions it's the most powerful thin, foot print on the market.   It replaces many different SKUs from multiple vendors which reduces costs substantially while increasing the security profiles. A classic example is our patch schedule. Since we are only a single piece of software, there's just one thing to patch. And we do it with zero-downtime.  Contrast that to other HCI or legacy solutions patch schedule which are incredibly complex and have many interdepencies requiring very carefully crafted and orchestrated patching. Because of the complexity of patching it takes longer, or worse doesn't get done which is the #1 reason ransomware attacks are successful - unpatch systems.

VMblog:  How is it different than HCI or VMware?

Ness:  The "C" in HCI means "converged". Convergence means bringing many together at the same time. In our case, there's only 1 thing, not many to "converged". So that's why we say we leapfrogged convergence. There's nothing to converge with Verge.io. It's already just a single piece of software. To boot most HCI solutions don't include the full stack. You still need special SANs for high performance, or networking gear that supports things like NSX. 

A base Verge.io installation only requires 2 commodity servers (for redundancy). You don't even need a switch. You can use cross connect cables and the NICs in the servers. Just cross connect the 2 servers and plug the additional NICs into your provider and viola you have virtual data centers in mouse clicks.

It's vastly simpler than VMware. It can require 5 or more VMware products, each with their own license, patch schedule and orchestration needs to accomplish what Verge.io does with one piece of software. VMWare, Openstack and other solutions consist of 10s of millions of lines of code which makes updates risky and complicated. Verge.io is only 300,000 lines of code dramatically simplifying the installation, deployment and maintenance.

VMblog:  What are typical use cases?

Ness:  We have 3 core type of customers: service providers; universities doing research and enterprises who act like service providers. By dramatically reducing the complexity and cost of their infrastructure, service providers realize much higher margins and gain a competitive advantage over the hyper-scale providers.

Universities use Verge.io for highly compliant medical and other research. The University of Michigan uses it to host over 1,000 virtual data centers, each containing highly sensitive medical research data sets. by using our recipes, they are able to create virtual data centers that are HIPAA, NIST and CIU compliant in mouse clicks. There's no other solution that can accomplish that.  Arizona State University uses our software for Covid research. They picked Verge.io over hyper scale providers and other legacy software providers because we can install the software and start creating virtual data centers in hours, all managed by a generalist IT. 

VMblog:  What's on the roadmap for Verge.io?

Ness:  We have found that our message of Simple works. We have successfully replaced Hyper-V, Openstack and VMware in the market place due to our simplicity, reduced cost and increased agility. The lack of need for expensive, credentialed IT staff to deploy and manage a Verge.io environment have allowed service providers and enterprises to avoid the staffing bottleneck (and costs) other legacy solutions require.

Future workloads will run outside the cloud, in the field and closer to "the edge."  To run those workloads will require software that has a tiny footprint, is autonomous and runs on commodity, not proprietary, hardware. Verge.io has been shipping software that meets these criteria for 5+ years now. We will continue to invest in our product to assure it remains the simplest solution, without sacrificing performance and can run autonomously.  Stay tuned.  

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