What Happens When You Move SQL from Flash to Spinning Disk in VergeOS

Most tiering demos show you the interface. This one shows you the cost. David Vincent moves a live SQL workload across VergeOS storage tiers, from NVMe down to 10K spinning disk and back, with the performance monitor running the whole time. The result surprises people. The working set stays cached in RAM and writes are absorbed by the NVMe journal, so a single transaction resolves in 146 microseconds whether the volume sits on flash or on spinning disk. Under a 10,000 request peak load, Tier 1 NVMe handles about 727 filings per second. Tier 5 spinning disk handles about 473, with commit latency still under a millisecond. That performance gap is real. It is also a fraction of the price gap between the two media. In this demo: • The four tier layout in the Verge lab, covering NVMe, SAS SSD, and 10K SAS spinning disk • Changing a volume's tier by opening the drive, setting Preferred Tier, and hitting submit • A live SQL workload moved from Tier 1 to Tier 4 with the latency graph running • Anatomy of one transaction: client request, pool check, RAM hit, disk skipped • A tax season scenario at 10,000 filings, run on NVMe and then again on spinning disk Auto-tiering guesses where your data should live. You already know. Tax season belongs on Tier 1, and the eleven months after it belong on Tier 5. The only question you answer is where the disks are today and where they should be tomorrow. This matters more in 2026 than it did three years ago. Flash and DRAM prices are climbing into 2027 as the cloud AI build out consumes supply. An all flash refresh becomes the most expensive way to solve a problem the drives you already own can solve. Watch the full session, "Can You Afford Your Next Storage Refresh?" https://www.verge.io/storage-refresh-... Read the argument in long form https://www.verge.io/blog/storage/sto... VergeOS combines virtualization, storage, and networking in a single code base. Capacity grows by adding drives to the servers you already own, rather than by buying another array with another license and another refresh cycle. #VergeOS #StorageTiering #SoftwareDefinedStorage #StorageRefresh #SQLServer #PrivateCloud #DataCenter #Virtualization #Infrastructure