“Toptracer…transmits about 40TB of network data daily from cameras in a typical 102-bay site. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and the VergeIO team helped us resolve some latency and routing issues with that traffic to distribute the load more efficiently among the cluster nodes,” he said.
VergeOS also appealed to Topgolf because its end-to-end automation did not require Topgolf to re-engineer its infrastructure as code. VergeOS being “API-first” was key here, Forehand explained, and its employees helped Topgolf build support for infrastructure-as-code tools Terraform and Ansible early in the migration.
Topgolf’s biggest challenge in moving away from VMware was coordinating all the projects it needed to do alongside replacing the server stack. Forehand explained:
On VxRail, Topgolf games were powered by the servers. With VergeIO, we simplified the gaming stack and moved everything to the peripheral gaming panels in the bay. This meant we had to replace all the gaming panels, rewire the columns, replace the server stack, and move to our new Kubernetes gaming architecture. We also stacked a few other projects with all of this to eliminate even more technical debt.
As Topgolf reduced its use of VMware, it also encountered difficulties integrating its new virtualization platform with third-party software, like Rubrik and LogicMonitor, which Topgolf uses to monitor its overall infrastructure.
VMware has been a leader in virtualization for decades, resulting in a wide range of enterprise products. This differs from newer competitors, which may not yet offer the same level of compatibility.
“Overall, the challenges have been pretty minimal,” Forehand said. “The real challenge was a hearts-and-minds outreach campaign to educate executives about the gaps that exist. With Rubrik, we moved to VergeIO Snapshot to fill the data protection gap that not being able to use Rubrik left us, but we didn’t have an immediate answer for some of Rubrik’s security features, like threat hunting and ransomware protection, so we switched to Veeam to fill those gaps for us.”
VergeIO’s strategy for addressing product integration challenges includes expanding the capabilities provided by third-party offerings in VergeOS and partnering “on those that matter most,” Crump said.
“Onboarding is the most common sticking point, and it appears after migration. …A customer wants to continue using a tool that they have already paid for and trained their staff for. If that vendor doesn’t yet support VergeOS, the customer needs to switch tools or run a workaround,” he said.
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