Topgolf saved over $11.3 million after leaving VMware

VergeIO gets about 70 new customers a quarter, “and most of them are coming off VMware,” Crump said. Most of those VMware migrators are facing renewal, are due for a hardware refresh, run many sites, or need multi-tenancy.

“Most customers bundle the [migration from VMware to VergeOS] with a hardware refresh or a modernization effort, as Topgolf did with its gaming architecture. Scheduling all of that together is the real work,” Crump said.

Topgolf’s migration

Since Broadcom’s takeover, VMware competitors have been aggressively courting VMware users. Topgolf ultimately chose VergeOS, a virtualization platform that combines compute, storage, disaster recovery, networking, and AI, because of its tenancy. Topgolf uses VergeOS’s Virtual Data Center offering for multi-tenant segmentation, where each tenant acts like an independent data center. Forehand explained:

VMware lacks the ability to segregate clusters into tenants, which has made it a nightmare to manage at scale. Even VMware’s [Software-Defined Data Center] Manager product couldn’t manage the number of vCenter instances we had in our environment. With VergeIO, we have been able to segregate our deployment into tenants by time zone, making upgrades and maintenance much easier. We’ve even been able to leverage tenancy to build nested labs within a single VergeIO cluster, which has saved [us] considerably on the requirement for lab hardware.

Topgolf replaced 650 VxRail hosts with about 400 Dell PowerEdge servers in about six months. Per a case study that VergeIO published, Topgolf moved from six-node VxRail clusters with 35TB of storage capacity to three-node VergeOS clusters with 5TB of storage capacity.

“Moving to Dell PowerEdge reduced comparative hardware spend by 87 percent,” Forehand said. “Obviously, with the shift in the market and massive increases in compute and storage cost, we have taken a hit to the original numbers, but it’s still exponential.”

Topgolf’s software costs, meanwhile, decreased by 77 percent. It also secured a five-year enterprise license agreement (ELA), compared to the three-year ELA that VMware reportedly offered.

Topgolf worked with VergeIO employees to develop a solution that accommodated some of its “weird” needs, such as performing machine learning-driven golf ball tracing via Topgolf’s proprietary Toptracer, which runs in the VergeIO cluster, Forehand said.