The Announcement

Scale Computing recently announced the availability of a new offering: Cloud Unity. I had the opportunity to speak with the Scale Computing team at VMworld US this year to run through some of the finer points of the announcement and thought I’d cover it off here.

Cloud What?

So what exactly is Cloud Unity? If you’ve been keeping an eye on the IT market in the last few years, you’ll notice that everything has cloud of some type in its product name. In this case, Cloud Unity is a mechanism by which you can run Scale Computing’s HC3 hypervisor nested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The point of the solution, ostensibly, is to provide a business with disaster recovery capability on a public cloud platform. You’re basically running an HC3 cluster on GCP, with the added benefit that you can create an encrypted VXLAN connection between your on-premises HC3 cluster and the GCP cluster. The neat thing here is that everything runs as a small instance to handle replication from on-premises and only scales up when you’re actually needing to run the VMs in anger. The service is bought through Scale Computing, and starts from as little as $1000US per month (for 5TB). There are other options available as well and the solution is expected to be Generally Available in Q4 this year.

Conclusion and Further Reading

This isn’t the first time nested virtualisation has been released as a product, with AWS, Azure and Ravello all doing similar things. The cool thing here is that it’s aimed at Scale Computing’s traditional customers, namely small to medium businesses. These are the people who’ve bought into the simplicity of the Scale Computing model and don’t necessarily have time to re-write their line of business applications to work as cloud native applications (as much as it would be nice that this were the case). Whilst application lift and shift isn’t the ideal outcome, the other benefit of this approach is that companies who may not have previously invested in DR capability can now leverage this product to solve the technical part of the puzzle fairly simply.

DR should be a simple thing to have in place. Everyone has horror stories of data centres going off line because of natural disasters or, more commonly, human error. The price of good DR, however, has traditionally been quite high. And it’s been pretty hard to achieve. The beauty of this solution is that it provides businesses with solid technical capabilities for a moderate price, and allows them to focus on people and processes, which are arguably the key parts of DR that are commonly overlooked. Disasters are bad, which is why they’re called disasters. If you run a small to medium business and want to protect yourself from bad things happening, this is the kind of solution that should be of interest to you.

A few years ago, Scale Computing sent me a refurbished HC1000 cluster to play with, and I’ve had first-hand exposure to the excellent support staff and experience that Scale Computing tell people about. The stories are true – these people are very good at what they do and this goes a long way in providing consumers with confidence in the solution. This confidence is fairly critical to the success of technical DR solutions – you want to leverage something that’s robust in times of duress. You don’t want to be worrying about whether it will work or not when your on-premises DC is slowly becoming submerged in water because building maintenance made a boo boo. You want to be able to focus on your processes to ensure that applications and data are available when and where they’re required to keep doing what you do.

If you’d like to read what other people have written, Justin Warren posted a handy article at Forbes, and Chris Evans provided a typically insightful overview of the announcement and the challenges it’s trying to solve that you can read here. Scott D. Lowe also provided a very useful write-up here. Scale Computing recently presented at Tech Field Day 15, and you can watch their videos here.