Transcript
got a special guest. Anytime we have a customer, it's always a special guest. But joining me from Net Depot is Ben Beasley. Ben, thanks for making the time and hanging out with us today. Glad to be here, George. Thanks for having us. No problem. As usual, we try not to flood people with 70 different PowerPoint slides. So Ben and I are just going to have a conversation about what his journey or his team's journey to VergeOS. And then he's going to show you our software running in their environment. So Ben, before we jump into kind of who Net Depot is and all that kind of stuff, can you give the folks just some background on kind of how you got here and what your background is? Well, I've built a whole career around VMware, unfortunately. I think I got my first VCP on vSphere 3.5 or vSphere 4.0. Maintained a double VCP with a data center cloud virtualization and cloud and automation, cloud management automation. Yeah, I've been working in managed services. Started spending a little time in the government space, doing government contracting with a lot of three-letter agencies and then moved over to the managed services space. And I've been in this space since about 2010, helping clients infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, managed services, a couple on that. And the majority of it revolved around VMware. And I've went from being a sales engineer, a systems engineer to sales engineer, to director of engineer, to solutions architect, to VP of solutions architect. So I ran the course of it all. Yeah, you've sort of been, you got to get the whole thing going there. So for folks that aren't familiar with NetDepot, I mean, obviously they can go to netdepot.com, but can you give them just a kind of an overview of the company and what you guys do? I'll give my one sentence pitch. NetDepot provides robust cloud and infrastructure services tailored to business needs. And that goes from anything from your on-prem equipment. We can bring stuff on-prem, our equipment and lease it to you and manage it for you, to cloud infrastructure, whether that be virtual private clouds, no noisy neighbors, you have your own private resources or multi-tenant resources, DR, backup and recovery, business continuity. What else we got? Bare metal, bare metal. You need some bare metal capability. We have that. We can load Verge on it for you. You can run your own Verge deployment for you, have us manage it for you. So that's awesome. So I think the, let's kind of jump into just a couple of things. Obviously, you know, at some point you didn't wake up one day and said, I'm bored. Let me kind of find something else with other than VMware out there. What led you to begin looking for a VMware alternative? We weren't looking, you know, fairly happy. I wouldn't say happy, content with VMware. We knew it. You know, we have knowledge built around a platform. You don't want to move away from it and learn something new. But the uncertainty surrounding Broadcom's acquisition of VMware prompted us to seek a more stable and efficient platform. So we were getting in touch with our aggregator, and they couldn't tell us what was going on. We didn't know if we were going to have licensing within a month, if we're going to continue providing the product. And we had hundreds, thousands of customers, thousands of VMs, and just the uncertainty around that. We needed a solution that offered clarity and reliability that could sustain our long-term strategy as a business. Makes sense. Can you elaborate a little bit on, so beyond the pricing, obviously, is a bigger, in your case, not even the pricing, but the lack of ability to get pricing, what other challenges were you facing with VMware? We had a lot of hardware sprawl. We had racks and racks and racks of host. That was a major issue that made management very difficult. You know, VMware is a decent product. I'm not going to badmouth VMware at all. Like I said, I've built a whole career around it. But we would like to get more dense host and shorten up our data center footprint. And we were unable to do that with the licensing, with the core account, and different challenges with that. And when we moved over to Verge, we were able to do that. Now we're using dual 96-core host. But we have many mainframes now. We're running thousands of VMs on single host. Yeah, I've run into customers who had explored the high-core count boxes, but the software ends up being two or three times the price of the hardware. And I don't care who you are, that's a really odd conversation to have with somebody that's not exactly technical, that they're like, okay, the hardware is this, and then the software that goes on it's twice that? How does that work, right? You know, so it's a, I always tell people, look, we help you avoid awkward conversations. At least the IT one, so with your kids, I can't help you. So you were kind of looking at the plan. What kind of specific goals were you hoping to achieve by going to a new platform? You know, kind of what were the main factors in selecting VergeIO? Well, we were looking for a platform that made sense of when wholesale changes to the organization. Like I said, we had a lot of VMware expertise. And to be fair, we did our due diligence. I'm not going to mention the other products that we looked at, but we looked at several other products as alternatives to VMware. And we needed something that was going to be stable to avoid any potential disruptions or other things with our current customer base. We needed something we could move to without disrupting their environment because we have tons of production environments, you know, maybe less interruption on the DR side of the house. Hopefully nobody has to use DR, but we have production workloads that we're going to migrate over and need to make sure we're going to disrupt those production problems. But we're looking for something we're familiar with. And while no platform was like VMware, you guys at Verge talked the same way as VMware. So it made sense to us. And I'm going from a VMware environment to a whole new environment. You guys said the same thing. The nomenclature was the same. vSAN made sense. The networking made sense. The networking is a little bit different, but it's not tricky. It's intuitive. So we had no wholesale changes. That was the main thing. Like I said, our human resources were built around VMware and support VMware infrastructure. And when it came to Verge, while it is different, it sounded exactly the same. And then when you get into it and you notice the visual aesthetic differences, it made sense still. You just said, it's like when going from Microsoft 10 to 11, I'm still avoiding that. It's the same platform. Stuff's in different places. And that was really the only challenge we had with Verge is getting familiar with the GUI, because as we talked about it and the things that it does, it was just like VMware. Yeah. You've got to click in different places. Like years ago when I went through this journey and started to look, it surprised me. Could you kind of get into sort of what I call the VMware tunnel? Because like you said, life is okay. You don't know that life could be any better. It's working. You don't want to kind of poke the bear, so to speak. Did it surprise you how many alternatives are out there? I mean, to me, I was like, wow, I didn't know all these guys were even out here. Did you find that at all? Yeah, I was surprised at the number. I did come across some things that we had not seen before. You know, at NetDepot, we're very diverse in our products set. While we don't offer certain products, we do support a lot of other products for our clients. And we have a smaller, more commodity web hosting platform that uses VPSs. So yeah, I was surprised at the number of VMware alternatives that came out. And there's a lot of marking around that if you search VMware alternatives. It's a broad acquisition. So some that I hadn't heard of did pop up, yes. Well, and trying to stay ranked on that is hard. Trust me, as a guy that has to pay attention to that sort of stuff. Hey, so walk me through the migration process. You talked about the little bit that, you know, kind of we do the same lingo and stuff. But when it got down to, you know, if you will, brass tacks of, okay, I got these VMs over here. How do I get them over there? How did that go for you guys? Well, I'll tell you, VMware to Verge is super simple. The migration was smoother than anticipated, with minimal issues, and a swift realization of the platform's benefits as soon as we got it up and running. And I think a lot of that, like I said, goes back to Verge and the nomenclatures being familiar. We know what apples to apples, right? Because you're calling it the same thing. Now, it's a different kind of apple. You got a Granny Smith apple and a Red Delicious, but they're both apples. So it made sense to us. One was green and one was red. But Verge's robust support team was instrumental in providing guidance throughout the process. I've not seen that level of support from VMware in any case. And they helped us avoid potential pitfalls, ensuring a seamless transition. So really credit the Verge staff. We didn't need them to necessarily hold our hand, but having them behind us through the migration process was really instrumental to our success. But the automated migration tool streamlined the process. You guys had already built in. You put in the vCenter or host username and password, and it connects. There is no crazy networking. You open up the ports, allow the VLAN over to the Verge platform, open up ports 443. And I don't know what the other one was. It's on a blank because I'm kind of nervous on this webinar. But anyway, you open up the right ports and connect, and it sees all the VMs immediately. You start selecting which ones you want to move over. It starts backing those VMs up, bringing them over. And then the cutover was smooth. Short downtime. I think there may be some other alternatives to avoid the downtime. But we were able to power off the production environment in VMware. I'll take one final delta of the backup, which took seconds because we were running pretty incremental backups to make sure we had the data over there. And fire them up on the Verge side, and then we're up and running. And the rollback plan was simple, too. If it didn't come up on Verge, you powered it back up on VMware. We didn't have to roll back on anything. Yeah, because we don't touch that environment. So it does make it. I like multiple checkpoints. As a DR guy, I like that a lot. So a question came in that I want to answer because I don't know. I think I know, but I don't know for 100% in your environment. So I'm going to answer it generally, then I'll ask specifically to you. So the question is, were you able to reuse any dedicated SAN units when transitioning to Verge IO? So let me first say that we do support dedicated SAN units. They have to be fiber channel attached today. We're working on iSCSI. And so we are a hyperconverged infrastructure at our core. That's the default. And I would say 90% of our customers use us that way. And Ben, you could probably speak to this part, is the performance of our vSAN or our storage service is very, very good. In most cases, we'll outperform vSAN that I've seen anyways. In many cases, we'll outperform iSCSI-attached arrays and NFS-attached arrays. So that's how that works. If you want, I'll put my email address in the chat. You can reach out to me, and I can take you through sort of how all that pulls together. But so Ben, you guys, I think, if I recall right, were a VMware vSAN environment prior. Am I remembering that correctly? No, sir. We were using iSCSI-attached. Well, so since 2010, when we really got hot and heavy and the VMware stuff deploying vCloud Director, we were using Fiverr Channel. And then as technology changed, we went to iSCSI. But we did try vSAN in its infancy, and it was clunky. We had spent a ton of money in SAN resources and stepped away from it. Then we tipped our toes back into it again in 2018. And the pricing, it was cheaper to stay on our old SAN hardware with the vSAN licensing. So we didn't do that. That was a little bit of a change for us, right? Since we'd always done attached storage, iSCSI-attached storage, and then moving to the hyper-converged storage. But over the six months since we've been running production environment with, how much is it? Six months now? Maybe longer. That sounds about right. I will preface it, we use all NVMe storage. So it's super fast anyway. That was an upgrade from our stuff. We invested in good hardware. We were making wholesale changes. We bought, like I said, the dual 96 core servers with two terabytes of RAM and loaded those up with NVMe storage. But the vSAN was not like I remember playing with VMware at all. We have had no issues. Customer performance is good. We took people that were using different storage profiles where they may have had a mixed bag of spinning disk and SSD, and now they're on NVMe. So of course, they're singing our praises. But the stability and issues of vSAN, there's no management to it. It just runs. I like that part. Yeah, there you go. Well, I think the other thing that's really important is because we are able to give you that performance and that experience, I think the fact that now you can go get a server class SSD, NVMe SSD, and use it, the cost difference is significant. So if you were running iSchedule, whoever asked that question, what we find a lot of times is the cost savings you're going to pick up in VMware more than covers the cost of buying some NVMe disks and throw them in the servers, and then you get the best of all possible worlds. So let's go back to where we were. So as you transitioned, or you said you did that cutover, any sort of immediate improvements you saw? I mean, obviously, I think cost savings are going to be one you're going to say, but also along the operational lines. So the first one was cost savings, right? Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure we'll hit on that a little later in the webinar. But the cost savings with the single licensing, that was immediately seen on the books. Our CEO was very happy about seeing the operational expenses go down. As we were putting this together, it was easy to add hosting into the VMware environment. I think they had that pretty down. But our deployment times are super fast with the Verge stuff. It is that simple. We hadn't built in necessarily the profiles and stuff. We're still working on that. But I think it would be as fast or not faster, if not faster than VMware when we get that. But the simplified management, reducing operational overhead, has been the main thing. As I said, I had four, five, six, seven racks loaded with one new servers. And now we're in a single rack with a couple of dual 96 core servers. So we're reducing some space in the data center and power. Yeah, a lot of good stuff. Well, that adds up. And that gets into the licensing model conversation. So just for those that don't know that might be on the webinar, we license by the physical server. So we don't charge by processor core, storage capacity, memory. And you had mentioned a vSAN because they charge by storage capacity. That can get expensive. So it's a one price fits all sort of model. And so it sounds like you've been... Give me a sense, again, how far you reduced from what to what? What did you say there? Extra seven racks. And we're into one rack right now, currently. But I mean, we had... So we're running maybe, I think, the Intel Silver. So we had a deck of core boxes. So we got rid of 20 core boxes and replaced them with dual 96 core. So you get, what's that? 380 core-ish vCPUs out of that with HyperThread. Yeah, these are dense. These are dense. They're really nice. And we're running them with two terabytes of RAM. Yeah, getting good of that. But Verge's licensing model allowed us to use... Allowed us to optimize hardware utilization. That was a key thing. Avoiding the higher cost associated with the VMware's per core licensing. I would never put a 96 core, much less a dual 96 core in a VMware environment. Not from our standpoint as a managed service provider. We're trying to get the most out of these. We're trying to get a return on our investment on this stuff. We had to make a little money on it. So yeah, the flexibility and license also means you can make the most of our hardware investment and scale up and down based on real-time demand without unnecessary expenses. So if we had to scale down our VMware environment, we still had these hosts in there. We're paying for the cores, whether we're utilizing them or not. I can deploy a dual 96 core server now and put one customer on it. I'm paying the same price for it if I had one or a thousand VMs on it. Yeah, gotcha. Okay, cool. So another question came in. Good questions, by the way, so far. I'll take this one. Is there a self-service portal allowing clients to interact with the workloads? There's actually a couple ways you can get there. We might dive into a little bit in this webinar, but we have a concept called multi-tenancy that's integrated into the product. We call them also virtual data centers. You'll hear that term as well. But essentially, when you create a virtual data center or a tenant, it is a complete instance of VergeOS running by itself. It's essentially firewalled off, if you will. And so that person could, you could then set that person up. They can be a complete administrator of that environment, but they can't screw up anybody else's environment. So that's how that part works. Ben, are you guys doing anything along those lines? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That was the main thing I was looking at. We're a big cloud director shop for people that didn't mind having shared infrastructure and a shared cloud environment. And Verge, the Verge tenant space is just like that, if not better to those that are, whomever asked that question, each individual tenant gets its own URL. They don't have to worry about what their internal IP space is. You attach the external IPs, just like vCloud. It works exactly like vCloud director. I think the interface is a little bit better, actually. And I'll be able to share that with the demo. I do have a tenant space in our dev environment that I can pull up. Okay, cool. So the next question, and again, keep the questions coming. We're here for you guys more than us. So they're impressed with your six or seven racks into one. He's assuming that the core counts and socket counts and RAM were increased on the hosts in the one rack. Well, you did say that you went to 96 cores. What were you, do you know what your server core count prior? Yeah, that was 10 per core. So we're using the DECA core, so we had 20 cores per server. Physical cores. And then RAM? Eight cores, but it was Intel Silver, and now we've switched to the AMD. We like them a whole lot better, too. We did a lot of work on that, too. Nice. What's the RAM in those servers? Do you know? Two terabytes. Okay. So, and that's the, I'll say from our perspective, we're pretty lightweight. We need, you probably know better than me, but. Yeah, we need a little bit of overhead just for memory, and that's about it. And then metadata, but most of it goes back to the workload. So it's pretty powerful from that perspective. So thank you guys for those questions. Again, keep them coming. We'll answer them in real time. All right, let's go back to us. So I think we kind of hit on the cost and efficiency stuff. Can you give me some insights on just how the TCO looks for you guys right now, and how you've been able to optimize resources? I think I'll just leave it at the total cost of ownership, that Verge reduced our total cost of ownership by lowering the licensing expenses, of course, and then enabling operation on less hardware. So, you know, we're not trying to keep up with 70, 80, 90. I don't remember how many hosts we had. But all these pizza boxes, and like I said, we've sold it down to one rack. Beyond licensing, Verge's efficient architecture reduced cooling and power, because we, like I said, we just went down from six or seven racks down to one. So our physical footprint in the data center, contributed to a leaner, and for those that like it, a greener space. Well, you know, data centers aren't cheap to build. So the longer you can keep stacking them in there, the better, right? We, I want to dive into networking, because I know that was something that you were really keen on with us. But before we do that, talk a little bit about data protection and disaster recovery. You know, obviously, we're always worried about cyber attacks and things like that. How have you found the data protection capabilities within the product? So it's built in, so that's good. We were using a third party to include Veeam, other platforms to back up our VMware environment. And now we're solely relying on the built-in Verge. So there's another cost savings. We're not paying points on the Veeam licensing anymore. Or we were able to reduce our commit. We still have some clients that utilize the Veeam. But we're using totally the Verge backup and DR environment. Verge to Verge, super simple. You have sites, Houston, Atlanta, that all they have the network connectivity between them, you connect them. It works awesome. But I think to the point of some of the listeners on board, VMware to Verge works really, really well too. That's a DR solution. You're looking for that DR environment, not ready to pull the trigger and get away from VMware or contractually stuck with VMware for a time being. Your DR solution can be Verge. It works seamlessly, just like the migration. You guys built this thing to take the VMware workload. So it works really well. Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of our customers, that's sort of their first, you know, they're like, oh, I'm going to do this. That's sort of their first toe they put in the water is just use us as a DR solution for a few months or in some cases longer. So that's a great, great point. So let's talk about networking. What I liked about our conversation is you were really pretty impressed with the networking. Just generally speaking, do you want to give us a quick overview of what you liked there? I liked that it was just like NSX without the fees. Just like NSX, just like the old NSX where we had the edge gateway firewalls that have both IPsec and SSL VPN capability. So when we went from NSX T to V or whichever way that is, then we had to start selling third-party firewalls to provide VPN connectivity to our clients. So a step away from the NSX edge gateways, we went to the new NSX because it didn't provide all the VPN capabilities that we needed, both SSL and IPsec. So yours comes built with that. And I think VMware may have resolved that issue as well. But yeah, the networking, a little bit different than the distributed switching that you see in VMware. So there's a little bit of change here in the nomenclature using virtual wires, but it kind of makes sense when you think about physical infrastructure. You have to have, you know, this switch has a bug in this, which you use virtual wire nomenclature. And once you understand it and get away from thinking in those distributed virtual switches and the stuff in VMware, it actually makes more sense than what you guys do. Okay, good. I like that. So basically everything you needed in NSX, you found kind of built into the product for the, I don't want to say for free, but built into the core license. Built into the core license, no additional licensing. We haven't been doing anything prior to the getting off VMware. We were using some of the advanced load balancing capabilities in VMware. But as this uncertainty with Broadcom came out, we quickly switched over to some, using some AWS stuff. So I'm able to test that stuff out with the capabilities of the Verge because we'd already moved some of those workloads over to AWS. But, you know, as we're now we're knee deep in Verge and this is our platform, we may look at pulling some of those services back over to our, for our customers, save them and us money. Yeah, makes sense. So while we're talking about your customers, I mean, somebody that's in your business is interesting to me because like if we screw up, it's not like we screw up at one place and the guy's down, we impact, you know, like you said, a couple hundred customers potentially. How's the customer, your customer experience been? I mean, I guess in some ways not even noticeable would be a win, right? Because it's seamless to them. But give me an idea of what that looks like. I think so we hadn't had any issues with Verge. So that's a testament to Verge or we're buying our time. You know, it's IT, something's going to happen. Might not be Verge's fault. It could be the hardware, but something's going to happen. But I think our customers experience faster service and for now improved reliability, making a noticeable change because we hadn't had any problems. And I won't say that we had a ton with VMware either. But when we had had things that didn't look right for us, you know, looking at the dashboard and the UI, when we contacted support, five minutes you're on a Zoom, not how much money you're spending or what level of service that you purchase support you purchase and your P1 takes four to six hours for somebody to get to it. Regardless of the priority, we're getting a response right away and usually a Zoom link. Hey, let's hop in and take a look at it. But we have not had, from the customer standpoint, no customers have been affected by any issues with Verge. Like I said, we've seen some things that didn't look right to us as we're growing into the environment. But anytime we've had to reach out to support, again, literally within five minutes, you have a Zoom link. Let's hop on, not passing emails back and forth like, well, what does this say? Download a support bundle for me. Send that over. You guys are going to hop on. And I hope you guys, as you grow, are going to be able to sustain that level of support. But that's huge. Yeah, we fully intend to. We're adding support guys as we speak, as a matter of fact. And the good news, you know, it kind of goes back to what you said at the beginning. Because the nomenclature is similar and things like that, we don't need to wait for these kind of Verge IO people to grow up, right? We can take a VMware guy and within, as you guys saw, right? Within a month or two, we can get them providing really good quality support because it's a kind of a seamless, even a mental seamless transition in addition to the migration itself. So I think that's great. That's awesome. A lot of your staff too, you guys have been in a lot of places, Nutanix and different places. You've got some really good engineers over there, haven't you? We spent some time with them, you know, in our vetting process. Really excited about the expertise that you guys have over there and how it relates to both VMware and hyper-converged environments. So that was a 7.2 in my mind, you know, what a little bit of say I had in our due diligence that weighed a lot on me is putting a checkbox in your area, the level of expertise you guys and where you guys, your staff had come from in their past experience. Yeah, awesome. Well, I appreciate that. So I want, we've been kind of getting everybody waiting here. So I want to jump into the demo so they can see how you guys are using the product and stuff like that. And I love to do that on these type of sessions. It's better for people to see you using it instead of me using it, especially because my environment is kind of boring. But just before we do that, what advice would you give, you know, you've gone through this now. So we've got some folks on the phone that are sitting in the seat you were sitting in six, eight months ago, trying to go through this transition. And it doesn't have to be necessarily a verge IO thing, but what would you, what advice would you give them to get started and go through the process? I recommend get started. If you contact you guys on the website, somebody's going to contact you right away. And then you're going to get a sales guy and an engineer fairly quick. That's good. But I think for companies considering the switch, I would recommend evaluating the overall value and scalability verge offers. And the return on investment will become evident pretty quickly. And once you get, you know, start comparing the apples to apples, they're not both the same kind of apple. You've got a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. They're pretty similar. I don't think you'll find your curve of learning is going to be very small than switching to something else. Take a look at your long-term needs and compare support, scalability, and operational efficiency. Verge IO's value is apparent from both the cost and the performance in our eyes. Perfect. Well, I'm going to let you get your screen sharing going while Ben's doing that. I've launched a poll. Actually, there's two questions in it because I honestly, I messed up when I put it in. But if you wouldn't mind answering those, I'd appreciate it. And I got some questions in the queue that I'm going to tackle while Ben is working on some stuff to get his environment going. So first, transitioning from Hyper-V to Verge IO. We can absolutely do that. It's honestly not, we didn't put the effort in just because it's a market share issue, right? So it's a little bit longer of a transition time. It's not terrible though. But yeah, so we can absolutely do that. We have multiple customers doing that. In fact, we have a case study on a company called SkiBig3, a large ski resort in Canada, that's doing it. Is there a formula for the amount of, okay, the amount of CPU and RAM saved? What I can generally tell you is we tend to see about 25% to 30% better CPU efficiency. Now, in fairness, that'll manifest itself in a couple of different ways. One might be you can just stack more VMs per physical host. The other might be if you have a performance demanding VM, it might, it probably will perform better. The same with memory, about 25% to 30% more efficient there. What backup solutions does Verge IO support? Well, as Ben said, we've got some very powerful data protection capabilities built into the product. We also have the ability to mount the environment as an NFS mount point. And so you can point your kind of legacy enterprise applications at it. And then we have a series of vendors that are getting ready to announce integrated support with it. They can trigger our snapshots and do change block tracking backups at that level. The first company to do that is a company called StoreWare. And so excellent product for that type of situation. So I answered that question on, so Veeam is, like what you would do right now with Veeam is you would get a kind of a, what I call a backup of last resort copy via that NFS mount point. And then if you need file by file recovery, you can also certainly put a Veeam agent in, which frankly Veeam is really good at deploying agents, ironically. And because of the CPU efficiency, there's really no impact to doing that. So pretty straightforward there. So from NSX to Verge, so yeah, there's no charge for any extra charge for any of that capability. So it's all built into the core product. Honestly, I don't know if we could charge you extra for it if we wanted to, because one thing we didn't really touch on in this webinar is everything is integrated into a single piece of code. So when Ben's team installed the product, there wasn't a bunch of VMs that he stood up to get networking working and get vSAN working. It's all one piece of code, which I think is part of the reason that people pick up on it so quick. So Nutanix clusters, another great question. So we have an odd level of experience with that. The last I recall, we have about five production customers running on Nutanix branded hardware. So we've done this multiple times. If it's Nutanix on VMware, you just use the same migration function that Ben was talking about. If it's AHV, almost went blank, the KVM version of Nutanix, that's also a pretty straightforward move over as well. So we can run on the existing hardware if you want to. It's a pretty seamless transition. And again, I've got that I can think of five or so production customers running on Nutanix branded hardware. So no issues there. And last one, and then I'm flipping it over to you. No, OK, that's it. All right, I'm clear. So anyways, keep those questions coming. We'll address them as they come in. But Ben, why don't you go ahead and share your screen and show us what you got? We're looking at it. You're live. Yep, you're perfect. All right, awesome. So I didn't really have any set thing I was going to go through. I just kind of want to show the UI and the simplicity of it. Like you said, everything's coding in the background. Putting this together does not require a VCSA, VMware vCenter appliance to run. So there's no added infrastructure, which is awesome. But the intuitiveness of it. Now, when I first logged in this, it does not look like vCenter. Obviously, it sounds like, what the heck is this? But if you look across, there's numerous ways to navigate the interface. And then it puts the breadcrumbs at the top. It's easy to get back. But virtual machines, you know, you got your left hand menu here. You can get everything. You also have them across the top. So if I wanted to get to the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines running within the platform, you get to the counts, the number of drives and NICs. Pretty detailed information on the dashboard. If you want to see your virtual machines, there they are. Just like VMware, getting into the virtual machine. And it'll pull up statistics on them. Got the monitoring information. You can look at your drives, your NICs. You can add devices. That's something we really didn't hit on is the way we're using Verge, that we didn't use VMware. As we have a sister company, and we're offering GPU resources to a sister company. I won't give them a plug. Ionstream. So if you don't need GPUs as a service, Ionstream's doing that. But at NetDepot, we're able to put GPUs in our Verge environment. We actually have customers who are doing training and inference through GPU pass-through in Verge environments. Using virtual machines. And we're adding those devices through the device tab. But if you want to edit the VM, it's super simple. Just like VMware, how many cores you want to add them up, which processor type. It's super simple working through the virtual machines. The console works really nice too. No more pop-ups. It's really simple to work with. I'll go back to the main dish. Like I said, there's not much to show here. It's pretty intuitive. But we'll get back to the main thing. Tenants, they asked about the vCloud director type environment. This is, you guys call them tenants. So I do have a tenant in here. This is our dev environment. So there's nothing production going on. But it gets its own URL. And our clients that are using this, they can map that to DNS to whatever they want it to be. Or we're able to do it within our DNS and put the customer name.netdepot.com or whatever. But yeah, so the customer can brand this however they want to. I don't think I can get in that tenant space in the URL. Yeah, there you go. So you assign the resources to it. And the customer runs with it. They have the networking. You have to provide the external networking. They can create all the internal network they want to. Don't have to worry about different VLANs. Just like vCloud director over there. You don't have to worry about what networks the other tenant's using. Because they're within this org only. Networks are pretty simple. You got your internal and your external networks. You can see all the networks. The VPN technology, we said that was built in, like the NSH gateway. So you do have the firewall. When you're creating these, you do have to create rules for the networks. And that is your firewall. So as you're building networks, you're creating the rules within the networks. And then when you're adding the wires, the rules are in there. So there's not like a rules page. Every network has its rules. If I go click on internal network, there's my rules. VPN wires, logs. But yeah, you're applying the rules. I don't know where I'm going there. But you're applying the rules to the networks as you build them. And you build those connections. Storage tiers and vSAN. Again, not a real clunky environment to work through. It's super simple. You can see the nodes and the drives. Super simple to set up and manage. And that's your key components. Your virtual machines, your tenants, your networks, and your storage. It's all in one place. And like I said, the GUI is really good. Really fast. Responds very quickly. I know when we went from VMware, we went from the client to HTML and HTML5. Sometimes it'd be slow to load when seeing those issues. And I wasn't seeing those issues in VMware before we moved off. But thinking about when they did make the changes. So it's really easy to work with. We're very happy with it, George. And I think people can just get over that it's not VMware thing out of their head. But I think of great value and the total cost of ownership, the benefits there as well. Yeah. So I do want to point out that if you saw on Ben's screen, you saw in his environment, two tiers. So we have a tier zero that's basically for our metadata. So it's a dedicated tier just for that. It's relatively. It's actually a very small thing. Relatively small. It is small. And then in his case, second tier, I guess that was some NVMe drives, Ben. Was that right? Yeah. So we're not doing different tiers of storage. We just have the NVMe tier in our current deployment. We just got a really good deal on these AMD servers with the NVMe. So yeah. So the next question came in is, can the tenants federate across locations? So the tenant itself is tied to one location at a time. I'm hoping I'm getting the spirit of the question correct. But it's really easy to move a tenant between locations or between Verge instances, which would be our terminology for it. So that's easy to do. I think, Ben, one of the things you were kind of touching on a little bit is disaster recovery because of the tenant technology and the fact that replication and everything was built in in our product is about as easy as I've ever seen disaster recovery become. Have you guys seen something similar? Yeah. And I wish I would reshare the screen a little bit. When you go to sites, am I on there? Yep, you're on. I'm on sites. No, it's on the wrong thing. That was on. Trying to get to the Verge thing. Where's it at? This one? Is it showing the map? Yes. OK. All right. Cool. I was seeing a confluence page. I'm sorry. I apologize a little bit. Why is it showing confluence? No problem. But while they do not federate, as you add sites and you can federate the, in the same terms, federate the Verge deployments and they will show up on the map for you, the Verge deployments and they will show up on the map for your DR purposes. But the VMs moving from one location to the next is not going to be accomplished. But yeah, you can federate the Verge deployments and they will show up on the map and you have the sites and those will be different DR locations or different sites. Perfect. OK, cool. Well, let's see. We've cleared the queue out. I do have a polling question up. A lot of you guys have already participated in it. So I thank you for that. A couple of links have been available to you. Feel free to take advantage of those. First is our hands-on lab. That is basically you're in charge of a full Verge instance. And we take you through three sessions or about 20 minutes each. One is that VMware migration process. So we show you the nitty gritty of that. The second goes through our data protection capabilities. So it's our snapshotting. You'll basically create a VM, create a file on that VM, delete some files off of that VM. And then one of the cool things about our snapshots is beyond just recovering a whole tenant or a VM, you can recover files from within the snapshot back to the production VM, which is pretty practical because a lot of times you don't need to restore the whole VM. You just want to restore a single file. And so we show you how to do that in that lab. And the final lab does get into the tenants. And so that's in there as well. So yeah, just click on either one of those and we'll get you all set up with that stuff. Ben, thanks very much for your time. Any closing thoughts? So I appreciate your time. And we appreciate the support from Verge. Any of the listeners on board, I hope they at least do some due diligence and look into it. Total cost savings and overall good experience. Thanks for your time, Joel. Appreciate you having me. No problem at all. One last question came in that I want to address. Yes, you can have multiple remote locations replicate back into a single designated DR. And then you benefit. One of the things we didn't talk about today is we have global inline deduplication built into the product. So let's say you had 10 sites. By the time you got to the third or fourth site, assuming some similarity between the sites, which is usually the case, the rest of the sites go really, really quick because we've already got all that data. So it is many to one and it's optimized, if you will, way unoptimized. So great, great last question. Way to sneak that one in there. So anyways, Ben, again, thanks very much for your time today. Appreciate it. Feel free to take advantage of the links that we've put into the webinar here. And we'll hopefully see you on the next event. Thanks, Ben. Cool.
