Hyperconverged like you just don’t care

Living in a small city, in a small country, I see a lot of small businesses. These customers will never have a virtualisation specialist on their staff, they barely have an IT specialist. These same customers find that their IT needs have grown beyond a single Windows server and some desktops. Some sort of virtualisation is going to be important for these customers, just as it is for enterprise customers.

Smaller customers want an easy button for virtualisation and they need it at a low price point. These customers do not care about hypervisors and shared storage. They barely care about the VMs. The customers care about what is inside the VMs, applications and data. Give these customers a cost-effective, reliable, and above all simple, platform for a dozen VMs and they will be happy. With these customers, there is no discussion of what is the best hypervisor and which advanced settings values provide optimal performance. No consideration of LUN sizes and multi-pathing. These customers don’t care about the infrastructure and technology that delivers their VMs. New VMs happen at most a few times a year, maybe not even every year. These are the customers that Scale Computing have built their platform to support.

Scale have built their hyperconverged platform on open source software and commodity hardware. The complexity that is needed to build the platform is hidden from users. The user interface is an HTML5 web page that can even be used from a smartphone browser. As the small support team identify resolutions for customer issues these resolution steps are automated into the platform. The next update distributes the fix to all customers.

Scale also do something very strange, they publish their prices in a pdf on their website. The cheapest configuration has three nodes each with 96GB of RAM and 72 TB of raw disk space. This US$25,500 configuration would probably support a business with a dozen servers and a couple of hundred PCs. This is a very accessible platform for businesses that simply want an infrastructure that works without needing to care about too many details.

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