The most common use case for the new single node Scale configuration will be providing ROBO capabilities and disaster recovery in conjunction with traditional three node appliances.
Jason Collier, Scale Computing co-founder
Indianapolis-based Scale Computing has announced a single node configuration of its HC3 virtualization platform. The new offering has the same software capabilities of the traditional cluster, and is designed to present a new price point starting in the $USD 6,000-7000 range.
“This is really focusing on the small of the small,” said Jason Collier, Scale Computing’s co-founder. “We have some of them in the field already, as we have been preselling them to get customer references.”
Scale Computing has always had a focus on the low end of the market, targeting the SMB and midmarket, while the other hyper-converged players are typically concentrated on the midmarket and enterprise. The one-node appliance has several clear use cases, however, which typically involve it being deployed in combination with the three-node HC3.
“It’s a strong ROBO [Remote/Branch Office] play, as well as in the retail space,” Collier said. “It works well for these purposes together with a conventional larger Scale cluster in the data centre. It also makes a great backup appliance. It can’t bring up an entire environment quickly, but it can bring up mission critical workloads for disaster recovery, and do so for less and more flexibly than in typical hyper-converged environments.”
While the single node form factor lacks some of the capabilities of the three node cluster, it has exactly the same software capabilities.
“The one node is not a cluster – it’s a server – and that means that you don’t get the high availability features of the cluster,” Collier said. “It does have all the software features of the HC3 though, including snapshotting and remote replication.”
Those software capabilities mean that the product still has value for getting a foothold in a customer, and serving as a base for future expansion – the traditional way that hyper-converged appliances have established a presence in larger companies.
“From what we have seen so far, the most interest is coming from MSP partners, especially if they want to sell disaster recovery services for small customers,” Collier said. “It’s easy to deploy and manage, with a monthly recurring revenue.”
Traditional solution partners may be less interested because of the low price, which starts at between $USD 6000 and $7000.
“Even for these partners though, it is still a good ‘land and expand’ product because it has those software features,” Collier said. Moreover, the pricing is so low that it is likely to attract new customers who haven’t looked at hyper-converged before.
“There’s no rocket science on how the pricing works,” Collier said. “It’s a third the price of a cluster – the price of a single node.”
The new single-node appliance configuration from Scale Computing is available now.
