Saratoga Casino Holdings Owns its Stack Again with VergeOS and CXTEC equal2new

VergeIO, the developer of VergeOS, and CXTEC, provider of the equal2new refurbished hardware program, announced that Saratoga Casino Holdings has replaced its VMware, Cisco UCS, and Pure Storage environment with VergeOS running on servers the company chose itself.The move removes roughly $50,000 a year in array maintenance and holds the performance of the all-flash storage it retired.

Saratoga Casino Holdings runs four casinos, anchored in Saratoga Springs, New York, with properties in Black Hawk, Colorado, Natchez, Mississippi, and Happy Valley, Pennsylvania. One corporate IT team supports all four, and player tracking sets the bar for uptime. A guest who inserts a player card and feeds a machine $20 expects credit for every dollar played.

The environment Scott Bargis inherited arrived with a business partnership rather than his own selection. That partner standardized the properties on Cisco UCS blades, mirrored Pure Storage arrays, and VMware, then wound down and handed the operating cost back to Saratoga. Server hardware aged, the post-Broadcom renewal asked Saratoga to surrender perpetual licenses it already owned and pay again, and array maintenance ran about $50,000 a year on its own.

Bargis surveyed the alternatives before he signed anything. Small-footprint hyperconverged platforms fell short on capacity and performance for a site holding 30 to 40TB, and Nutanix priced close enough to VMware that he grouped the two together. CXTEC, a hardware partner since 2016, asked for two days to architect a solution using VergeOS. That design came in at almost half the price of Scale Computing, well under Nutanix, and carried more compute, RAM, and storage capacity.

Hardware choice carried equal weight. Nutanix and Scale Computing sell their own systems or restrict buyers to a narrow compatibility list, and VergeOS installs on standard x86 servers the customer picks. Bargis chose CXTEC equal2new, the program he already trusted for network switches. Engineers from VergeIO and CXTEC sized and delivered four nodes within a couple of weeks.

He proved the platform first on a micro PC the company uses as a desktop workstation, a single node with 16GB of RAM and about a terabyte of SSD. He tested installation, performance, instant recovery, and the hardware-agnostic claim, and his administrators reached the same verdict.

“This is the best compromise between the Scale Computing hypervisor and VMware that I have seen yet. It does everything we need it to do, and I haven’t found one thing it can’t,” said Scott Bargis, corporate director, IT, Saratoga Casino Holdings.

A casino management system update set the schedule. Saratoga deployed the new player-tracking workloads onto VergeOS first, then moved the three-terabyte file server and the on-premises email server. Each cutover staged the workload, replicated it from VMware, powered down the source, ran a final sync, and restarted it on VergeOS in about 10 seconds.

Performance mattered most, since Saratoga was leaving one of the faster all-flash arrays on the market. Bargis keeps the same database replicated on both platforms and compares them by feel.

“If you blindfolded me, I wouldn’t be able to tell. It is no different other than my checkbook has a little more money in it,” continued Bargis.

Growth works differently now. Adding capacity to VergeOS means adding a node, and the workload spreads across the cluster instead of concentrating in a single chassis.

“equal2new puts tested, warrantied hardware in the rack on the customer’s schedule, and VergeOS lets that customer pick the servers. Saratoga shows what the two do together,” added Alan Truex, VP, sales, CXTEC.

“Scott inherited a stack someone else picked, on license terms someone else set. He took that decision back. He chose his own nodes, held performance against an all-flash array, and took cost out of the budget,” concluded George Crump, CMO, VergeIO.

VergeOS and CXTEC equal2new are available together today. Organizations weighing a VMware renewal can bring a current inventory and receive a combined software and hardware assessment.