How Saratoga Casino Left VMware, Cisco UCS, and Pure Storage Behind | Full Webinar

Scott Bartgis inherited a stack another company picked. A corporate partner standardized four casino properties on Cisco UCS blades, mirrored Pure Storage arrays, and VMware, spent about $300,000 doing it, then wound down and handed him the operating cost. Eleven years later he replaced all three with VergeOS running on refurbished servers he chose himself. Recorded live on August 13, 2026. Scott, Corporate Director of IT at Saratoga Casino Holdings, gives the full account on the record. Ben Marquis of CXTEC supplied the hardware. Aaron Richman hosts, and Dave Vincent of VergeIO runs the second half on screen. WHAT SCOTT REPORTS Array maintenance alone cost $15,000 to $20,000 per array per year, and he had two. Renewals climbed from the 30s to the 50s and 60s before the post-Broadcom VMware terms took effect. He stopped renewing, kept his perpetual licenses, and sat on an unpatchable hypervisor until he found a way out. The proof of concept ran on a Dell micro PC with 16 GB of RAM. The install took 15 minutes. He priced four options. Scale Computing fell short on capacity. Nutanix priced close enough to VMware that he grouped them together. New Dell servers came with a four- to six-month lead time. CXTEC delivered four equal2new® nodes in about two weeks. The result: twice the capacity on half the hardware, at about half the price, and roughly a quarter of what the original UCS and Pure design cost eleven years earlier. On performance against the retired all-flash array, his verdict is on camera. "If you blindfolded me, I wouldn't be able to tell." WHAT YOU WILL SEE 1. Import a VMware VM. Dave connects VergeOS to vCenter, syncs a running SQL Server workload, and pulls it into VergeOS. Cutover time, about ten seconds. Scott has run that same cutover 36 times with 19 left to go. 2. Move storage between tiers. A SQL VM shifts from tier three to tier one in the GUI, then back again from the Verge CLI with a timer running. The move completes in 1.3 seconds, with no copy window and no second product. 3. Live-migrate a workload under load. A custom application queries a SQL Server database at about 85,000 rows per second. The VM migrates between nodes mid-query. Availability holds at 100 percent and the row count never drops. Dave then triggers the same migration by putting a node into maintenance mode.