The new offerings are more powerful than the appliances Scale has offered before, but they aren’t looking to move upmarket, just satisfy the demand of storage-hungry SMBs and midmarket customers.
Scale Computing co-founder Jason Collier
Indianapolis based and SMB-focused Scale Computing has announced the availability of two new hyper- converged appliances – the HC1150DF and HC5150D. Both are more powerful – in different ways – than anything Scale has produced before. The company insists, however, that it is not looking to move upmarket from its base among SMBs, parts of the midmarket, and ROBO use cases in enterprises. Instead they say that the new appliances simply respond to the need from some customers for more oomph.
“We are not looking at enterprise data centre applications or anything like that,” said Jason Collier, Scale Computing’s co-founder. “These are for the market we are already in, and just indicates that they wanted more. We are getting pulled more and more into enterprise deals, but we aren’t changing the product for enterprises. These are ROBO deployments. We did just sign an enterprise steel company with the HC5150D. They liked the remote management capability.”
Collier said that it’s increasingly necessary to be able to hit certain types of enterprise performance levels, even though they aren’t going after the enterprise data centre.
“We have NVMe running in the lab today,” he said. “Obviously, that’s not SMB. We are sustaining multiple million IOPs at upper double-digit microsecond latency – 75 milliseconds. We are doing it to find weaknesses in our own software architecture. I don’t see us as an enterprise data centre company, but I do see us being able to run enterprise apps at that level.”
The two new models are the HC1150DF, and all-flash model, and the HC5150D, an ultra-dense model that has three times the storage capacity of their HC1150D.
The HC1150 DF is Scale’s first all-flash appliance.
“This is something that people in our market were asking for,” Collier said. “It can expand to 8 TB of flash in a single node starting at $18,500 per node. It supports a single configuration deployment, and also has flexible mix and match capacity within the nodes
“Business analytics software was a big driver for this,” Collier indicated.
The HC5150D has up to 77 TB of hybrid flash storage per node.
“It is a storage dense system, with 2U rather than one U, and is sold only with a 10 GB backplane, Collier said. “It allows us to scale up to half a petabyte of raw storage. A lot of mid-market CIOs have between 50 TB and 200 TB of data stored, and this is there to address those demands.”
Scale also is releasing a new 7.3 version of its patented HyperCore software for the new HC1150DF and HC5150D appliances. It’s not yet available on their previous models, but that will come in an update later this year. The key addition here is deduplication.
“We already had storage efficiencies built in before, to do cloning in particular,” Collier said. “We have added post-process duplication. It’s actually more than dedupe, but that has become the industry term, so that’s what we are using.”
With the addition of deduplication to HC3, Scale now provides more detail about the storage, a combination of utilization, efficiency, and provisioning metrics for both logical and physical storage views. The 7.3 release also allows multi-user Login with audit logs, and a new management view for remote cluster monitoring, which lets multiple HC3 clusters be monitored at a glance to check health and status.
“The remote cluster monitoring is bringing us success in retail spaces,” Collier said. “A European grocery chain will use it for 900 locations by the end of the year, and 7000 within three years.”
Collier said that the hyper-converged market ‘crossed the chasm,’ late last year, in the sense that now everyone knows what it is.
“There has honestly been a dramatic shift,” he said. “The market is changing as well. We used to see SimpliVity a lot in deals we were after, but we haven’t seen a single one since the acquisition. They seem to have moved upmarket with HPE. Now, we hit Nutanix in nearly every deal. It used to be when Nutanix was there and we were there, someone was in the wrong room.”
Collier said Scale has major advantages in their market against these players, both in their simpler design and their price point, where a three-node system is sub-$100,000. He pointed out though, that they can do well in head to head competition.
“With that European chain, the deal was between SimpliVity, Nutanix and us,” he said. “SimpliVity was the first out, and we won a POC bakeoff with Nutanix.”
Both the new appliances are available now.
