“Toptracer … pushes about 40TB of network data from the cameras in a typical 102-bay venue per day. That’s a lot of bandwidth, and the VergeIO team helped us solve some latency and pathing issues with that traffic to spread the load more effectively across the nodes in the cluster,” he said.
VergeOS also appealed to Topgolf because its end-to-end automation didn’t require Topgolf to retool its infrastructure-as-code. VergeOS being “API-first” was key here, Forehand explained, and its employees helped Topgolf develop support for infrastructure-as-code tools Terraform and Ansible early in migration.
Topgolf’s biggest challenge in ditching VMware has been coordinating all the projects it had to do alongside the server stack replacement. Forehand explained:
On VxRail, Topgolf gaming was powered by the servers. With VergeIO, we simplified the gaming stack and moved everything to the edge game panels in the bay. That meant we had to replace all of the game panels, rewire the columns, replace the server stack, and swap to our new Kubernetes gaming architecture. We also piled a few other projects in there with all of that to eliminate even more technical debt.
As Topgolf reduced its use of VMware, it also encountered challenges trying to integrate 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 has been a hearts-and-minds campaign to educate leadership on the gaps that do exist. With Rubrik, we moved to the VergeIO snapshotting 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 the Rubrik security features, like threat hunting and ransomware protection, so we’ve pivoted to Veeam to fill those gaps for us.”
VergeIO’s strategy for addressing product integration challenges includes building the capabilities delivered through third-party offerings into VergeOS and partnering “on the ones that matter most,” Crump said.
“Integration is the most common friction point, and it shows up after the migration. … A customer wants to keep using a tool it has already paid for and trained staff on. If that vendor doesn’t support VergeOS yet, the customer has to switch tools or run a workaround,” he said.