Category Archives: Scale Computing

Random Short Take #20

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Here are some links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 20 – feels like it’s becoming a thing.

  • Scale Computing seems to be having a fair bit of success with their VDI solutions. Here’s a press release about what they did with Harlingen WaterWorks System.
  • I don’t read Corey Quinn’s articles enough, but I am glad I read this one. Regardless of what you think about the enforceability of non-compete agreements (and regardless of where you’re employed), these things have no place in the modern workforce.
  • If you’re getting along to VMworld US this year, I imagine there’s plenty in your schedule already. If you have the time – I recommend getting around to seeing what Cody and Pure Storage are up to. I find Cody to be a great presenter, and Pure have been doing some neat stuff lately.
  • Speaking of VMworld, this article from Tom about packing the little things for conferences in preparation for any eventuality was useful. And if you’re heading to VMworld, be sure to swing past the VMUG booth. There’s a bunch of VMUG stuff happening at VMworld – you can read more about that here.
  • I promise this is pretty much the last bit of news I’ll share regarding VMworld. Anthony from Veeam put up a post about their competition to win a pass to VMworld. If you’re on the fence about going, check it out now (as the competition closes on the 19th August).
  • It wouldn’t be a random short take without some mention of data protection. This article about tiering protection data from George Crump was bang on the money.
  • Backblaze published their quarterly roundup of hard drive stats – you can read more here.
  • This article from Paul on freelancing and side gigs was comprehensive and enlightening. If you’re thinking of taking on some extra work in the hopes of making it your full-time job, or just wanting to earn a little more pin money, it’s worthwhile reading this post.

Scale Computing Announces HE500 Range

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Scale Computing recently announced its “HC3 Edge Platform“. I had a chance to talk to Alan Conboy about it, and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

 

The Announcement

The HE500 series has been introduced to provide smaller customers and edge infrastructure environments with components that better meet the sizing and pricing requirements of those environments. There are a few different flavours of nodes, with every node offering E-2100 Intel CPUs, 32 – 64GB RAM, and dual power supplies. There are a couple of minor differences with regards to other configuration options.

  • HE500 – 4x 1,2,4 or 8TB HDD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE550 – 1x 480GB or 960GB SSD, 3x 1,2, or 4TB HDD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE550F – 4 x 240GB, 480GB, 960GB SSD, 4x 1GbE, 4x 10GbE
  • HE500T – 4x 1,2,4 or 8TB HDD, 8 x HDD 4TB, 8TB, 2x 1GbE
  • HE550TF – 4 x 240GB, 480GB, 960GB SSD, 2x 1GbE

The “T” version comes in a tower form factor, and offers 1GbE connectivity. Everything runs on Scale’s HC3 platform, and offers all of the features and support you expect with that platform. In terms of scalability, you can run up to 8 nodes in a cluster.

 

Thoughts And Further Reading

In the past I’ve made mention of Scale Computing and Lenovo’s partnership, and the edge infrastructure approach is also something that lends itself well to this arrangement. If you don’t necessarily want to buy Scale-badged gear, you’ll see that the models on offer look a lot like the SR250 and ST250 models from Lenovo. In my opinion, the appeal of Scale’s hyper-converged infrastructure story has always been the software platform that sits on the hardware, rather than the specifications of the nodes they sell. That said, these kinds of offerings play an important role in the market, as they give potential customers simple options to deliver solutions at a very competitive price point. Scale tell me that an entry-level 3-node cluster comes in at about US $16K, with additional nodes costing approximately $5K. Conboy described it as “[l]owering the barrier to entry, reducing the form factor, but getting access to the entire stack”.

Combine some of these smaller solutions with various reference architectures and you’ve got a pretty powerful offering that can be deployed in edge sites for a small initial outlay. People often deploy compute at the edge because they have to, not because they necessarily want to. Anything that can be done to make operations and support simpler is a good thing. Scale Computing are focused on delivering an integrated stack that meets those requirements in a lightweight form factor. I’ll be interested to see how the market reacts to this announcement. For more information on the HC3 Edge offering, you can grab a copy of the data sheet here, and the press release is available here. There’s a joint Lenovo – Scale Computing case study that can be found here.

Random Short Take #16

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I recently found interesting. You might find them interesting too. Episode 16 – please enjoy these semi-irregular updates.

  • Scale Computing has been doing a bit in the healthcare sector lately – you can read news about that here.
  • This was a nice roundup of the news from Apple’s recent WWDC from Six Colors. Hat tip to Stephen Foskett for the link. Speaking of WWDC news, you may have been wondering what happened to all of your purchased content with the imminent demise of iTunes on macOS. It’s still a little fuzzy, but this article attempts to shed some light on things. Spoiler: you should be okay (for the moment).
  • There’s a great post on the Dropbox Tech Blog from James Cowling discussing the mission versus the system.
  • The more things change, the more they remain the same. For years I had a Windows PC running Media Center and recording TV. I used IceTV as the XMLTV-based program guide provider. I then started to mess about with some HDHomeRun devices and the PC died and I went back to a traditional DVR arrangement. Plex now has DVR capabilities and it has been doing a reasonable job with guide data (and recording in general), but they’ve decided it’s all a bit too hard to curate guides and want users (at least in Australia) to use XMLTV-based guides instead. So I’m back to using IceTV with Plex. They’re offering a free trial at the moment for Plex users, and setup instructions are here. No, I don’t get paid if you click on the links.
  • Speaking of axe-throwing, the Cohesity team in Queensland is organising a social event for Friday 21st June from 2 – 4 pm at Maniax Axe Throwing in Newstead. You can get in contact with Casey if you’d like to register.
  • VeeamON Forum Australia is coming up soon. It will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Sydney on July 24th and should be a great event. You can find out more information and register for it here. The Vanguards are also planning something cool, so hopefully we’ll see you there.
  • Speaking of Veeam, Anthony Spiteri recently published his longest title in the Virtualization is Life! catalogue – Orchestration Of NSX By Terraform For Cloud Connect Replication With vCloud Director. It’s a great article, and worth checking out.
  • There’s a lot of talk and slideware devoted to digital transformation, and a lot of it is rubbish. But I found this article from Chin-Fah to be particularly insightful.

Scale Computing and Leostream – Better Than Bert And Ernie

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Scale Computing recently announced some news about a VDI solution they delivered for Illinois-based Paris Community Hospital. I had the opportunity to speak with Alan Conboy about it and thought I’d share some coverage here.

 

VDI and HCI – A Pretty Famous Pairing

When I started to write this article, I was trying to think of a dynamic duo that I could compare VDI and HCI to. Batman and Robin? Bert and Ernie? MJ and Scottie? In any case, hyper-converged infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure has gone well together since the advent of HCI. It’s my opinion that HCI is in a number of enterprises by virtue of the fact that a VDI requirement arose. Once HCI is introduced into those enterprise environments, folks start to realise it’s useful for other stuff too.

Operational Savings

So it makes sense that Scale Computing’s HC3 solution would be used to deliver VDI solutions at some stage. And Leostream can provide the lifecycle manager / connection broker / gateway part of the story without breaking a sweat. According to Conboy Paris Community Hospital has managed to drastically reduce its operating costs, to the point that it’s reduced its resource investment to a part-time operations staff member to manage the environment. They’re apparently saving around $1 million (US) over the next five years, meaning they can now afford an extra doctor and additional nursing staff.

HCI – It’s All In The Box

If you’re familiar with HCI, you’ll know that most of the required infrastructure comes with the solution – compute, storage, and hypervisor. You also get the ability to do cool stuff in terms of snapshots and disaster recovery via replication.

 

Thoughts

VDI solutions have proven popular in healthcare environments for a number of reasons. They generally help the organisation control the applications that are run in the (usually) security-sensitive environment, particularly at the edge. It’s also useful in terms of endpoint maintenance, and removes the requirement to deploy high end client devices in clinical environments. It also provides a centralised mechanism to ensure that critical application updates are performed in a timely fashion.

You won’t necessarily save money deploying VDI on HCI in terms of software licensing or infrastructure investment. But you will potentially save money in terms of the operational resources required for endpoint and application support. If you can then spend those savings on medical staff, that has to be a win for the average healthcare organisation.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t get overly excited about VDI solutions. I can see the potential for value in some organisations, but I tend to lose focus rapidly when people start to talk to me about this stuff. That said, I do get enthusiastic about HCI solutions that make sense, and deliver value back to the business. It strikes me that this Scale Computing and Leostream combo has worked out pretty well for Paris Community Hospital. And that’s pretty cool. For more insight, Scale Computing has published a Customer Case Study that you can read here.

Random Short Take #11

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find it interesting too. Maybe. Happy New Year too. I hope everyone’s feeling fresh and ready to tackle 2019.

  • I’m catching up with the good folks from Scale Computing in the next little while, but in the meantime, here’s what they got up to last year.
  • I’m a fan of the fruit company nowadays, but if I had to build a PC, this would be it (hat tip to Stephen Foskett for the link).
  • QNAP announced the TR-004 over the weekend and I had one delivered on Tuesday. It’s unusual that I have cutting edge consumer hardware in my house, so I’ll be interested to see how it goes.
  • It’s not too late to register for Cohesity’s upcoming Helios webinar. I’m looking forward to running through some demos with Jon Hildebrand and talking about how Helios helps me manage my Cohesity environment on a daily basis.
  • Chris Evans has published NVMe in the Data Centre 2.0 and I recommend checking it out.
  • I went through a basketball card phase in my teens. This article sums up my somewhat confused feelings about the card market (or lack thereof).
  • Elastifile Cloud File System is now available on the AWS Marketplace – you can read more about that here.
  • WekaIO have posted some impressive numbers over at spec.org if you’re into that kind of thing.
  • Applications are still open for vExpert 2019. If you haven’t already applied, I recommend it. The program is invaluable in terms of vendor and community engagement.

 

 

Random Short Take #10

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Here are a few links to some random news items and other content that I found interesting. You might find it interesting too. Maybe. This will be the last one for this year. I hope you and yours have a safe and merry Christmas / holiday break.

  • Scale Computing have finally entered the Aussie market in partnership with Amnesium. You can read more about that here. 
  • Alastair is back in the classroom, teaching folks about AWS. He published a bunch of very useful notes from a recent class here.
  • The folks at Backblaze are running a “Refer-A-Friend” promotion. If you’re looking to become a new Backblaze customer and sign up with my referral code, you’ll get some free time on your account. And I will too! Hooray! I’ve waxed lyrical about Backblaze before, and I recommend it. The offer runs out on January 6th 2019, so get a move on.
  • Howard did a nice article on VVols that I recommend checking out.
  • GDPR has been a challenge (within and outside the EU), but I enjoyed Mark Browne‘s take on Cohesity’s GDPR compliance.
  • I’m quite a fan of the Netflix Tech Blog, and this article on the Netflix Media Database was a ripper.
  • From time to time I like to poke fun at my friends in the US for what seems like an excessive amount of shenanigans happening in that country, but there’s plenty of boneheaded stuff happening in Australia too. Read Preston’s article on the recently passed anti-encryption laws to get a feel for the heady heights of stupidity that we’ve been able to reach recently.

 

Scale Computing Have Been Busy

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I recently had the opportunity to get on a call with Alan Conboy to talk about what’s been happening with Scale Computing lately. It was an interesting chat, as always, and I thought I’d share some of the news here.

 

Detroit Rock City

It’s odd how sometimes I forget that pretty much every type of business in existence uses some form of IT. Arts and performance organisations, such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are no exception. They are also now very happy Scale customers. There’s a YouTube video detailing their experiences that you can check out here.

 

Lenovo Partnership

Scale and Lenovo recently announced a strategic partnership, focussed primarily on edge workloads, with particular emphasis on retail and industrial environments. You can download a solution brief here. This doesn’t mean that Lenovo are giving up on some of their other HCI partnerships, but it does give them a competent partner to attack the edge infrastructure market.

 

GCG, Yeah You Know Me

Grupo Colón Gerena is a Puerto Rico-based “restaurant management company that owns franchises of brands including Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Famous Davés, Sizzler’s, Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Red Lobster throughout the island”. You may recall Puerto Rico suffered through some pretty devastating weather in 2017 thanks to Hurricane Maria. GCG have been running the bulk of their workload in Google Cloud since just before the event, and are still deciding whether they really want to move it back to an on-premises solution. There’s definitely a good story with Scale delivering workloads from the edge to the core and through to Google Cloud. You can read the full case study here.

 

Thoughts

It’s no big secret that I’m a fan of Scale Computing. And not just because I have an old HC1000 in my office that I fire up every now and then (Collier I’m still waiting on those SSDs you promised me a few years ago). They are relentlessly focussed on delivering easy to use solutions that work well and deliver great resiliency and performance, particularly in smaller environments. Their DRaaS play, and partnership with Google, has opened up some doors to customers that may not have considered Scale previously. The Lenovo partnership, and success with customers like GCG and DSO, is proof that Scale are doing a lot of good stuff in the HCI space.

Anyone who’s had the good fortune to deal with Scale, from their executives and founders through to their support staff, will tell you that they’re super easy to deal with and pretty good at what they do. It’s great to see them enjoying some success. It strikes me that they go about their business without a lot of the chest beating and carry on associated with some other vendors in the industry. This is a good thing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for them.

Scale Computing Announces Partnership With APC by Schneider Electric For DCIAB

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(I’m really hoping the snappy title will bring in a few more readers). I recently had a chance to speak with Doug Howell, Senior Director Global Alliances at Scale Computing about their Data Centre In A Box (DCIAB) offering in collaboration with APC by Schneider Electric and thought I’d share some thoughts.

 

It’s A Box

Well, a biggish box. The solution is built on APC’s Micro Data Centre solution, combined with 3 Scale HC3 1150 nodes. The idea is that you have 1 SKU to deal with, which includes the Scale HC3 nodes, UPS, PDUs, and rack. You can then wheel it in, plug it in to the wall and network and it’s ready to go. Howell mentioned that they have a customer that is in the process of deploying a significant amount of these things in the wild.

Note that this is slightly different to the EMEA campaign with Lenovo from earlier in the year and is focused, at this stage, on the North American market. You can grab the solution brief from here.

 

Thoughts

The “distributed enterprise” has presented challenges to IT organisations for years now. Not everyone works in a location that is nicely co-located with headquarters. And these folks need compute and storage too. You’ve no doubt heard about how the “edge” is the new hotness in IT, and I frequently hear pitches from vendors talking about how they handle storage or compute requirements at the edge in some kind of earth-shattering way. It’s been a hard problem to solve, because locality (either for storage or compute or both) is generally a big part of the success of these solutions, particularly from the end user’s perspective. This is oftentimes at odds with traditional enterprise deployments, where all of the key compute and storage components are centrally located for ease of access, management and protection. Improvements in WAN technologies, and distributed application availability is changing that story to an extent though, hence the requirement for these kind of edge solutions. Sometimes, you just need to have stuff close to where you’re main business activity is occurring.

So what makes the Scale and APC offering any different? Nothing really, except that Scale have built their reputation on being able to deliver simple to operate hyper-converged infrastructure to small and medium enterprises with a minimum of fuss and at a reasonable price point. The cool thing here is that you’re also leveraging APC’s ability to deliver robust micro DC services with Scale’s offering that can fit in well with their other solutions, such as DRaaS.

Not every solution from every vendor needs to be unique for it to stand out from the crowd. Scale have historically demonstrated a relentless focus on quality products, excellent after-sales support and market focus. This collaboration will no doubt open up some more doors for them with APC customers who were previously unaware of the Scale story (and vice versa). This can only be a good thing in my opinion.

2018 AKA The Year After 2017

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I said last year that I don’t do future prediction type posts, and then I did one anyway. This year I said the same thing and then I did one around some Primary Data commentary. Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing, so here we are again. This time around, my good buddy Jason Collier (Founder at Scale Computing) had some stuff to say about hybrid cloud, and I thought I’d wade in and, ostensibly, nod my head in vigorous agreement for the most part. Firstly, though, here’s Jason’s quote:

“Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it’s not on-premises versus the cloud. It’s on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments”.

 

The Cloud

I talk to people every day in my day job about what their cloud strategy is, and most people in enterprise environments are telling me that there are plans afoot to go all in on public cloud. No one wants to run their own data centres anymore. No one wants to own and operate their own infrastructure. I’ve been hearing this for the last five years too, and have possibly penned a few strategy documents in my time that said something similar. Whether it’s with AWS, Azure, Google or one of the smaller players, public cloud as a consumption model has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get stuff working up there reliably. Why? Because no-one wants to spend time “re-factoring” their applications. As a result of this, a lot of people want to lift and shift their workloads to public cloud. This is fine in theory, but a lot of those applications are running crusty versions of Microsoft’s flagship RDBMS, or they’re using applications that are designed for low-latency, on-premises data centres, rather than being addressable over the Internet. And why is this? Because we all spent a lot of the business’s money in the late nineties and early noughties building these systems to a level of performance and resilience that we thought people wanted. Except we didn’t explain ourselves terribly well, and now the business is tired of spending all of this money on IT. And they’re tired of having to go through extensive testing cycles every time they need to do a minor upgrade. So they stop doing those upgrades, and after some time passes, you find that a bunch of key business applications are suddenly approaching end of life and in need of some serious TLC. As a result of this, those same enterprises looking to go cloud first also find themselves struggling mightily to get there. This doesn’t mean public cloud isn’t necessarily the answer, it just means that people need to think things through a bit.

 

The Edge

Another reason enterprises aren’t necessarily lifting and shifting every single workload to the cloud is the concept of data gravity. Sometimes, your applications and your data need to be close to each other. And sometimes that closeness needs to occur closest to the place you generate the data (or run the applications). Whilst I think we’re seeing a shift in the deployment of corporate workloads to off-premises data centres, there are still some applications that need everything close by. I generally see this with enterprises working with extremely large datasets (think geo-spatial stuff or perhaps media and entertainment companies) that struggle to move large amounts of the data around in a fashion that is cost effective and efficient from a time and resource perspective. There are some neat solutions to some of these requirements, such as Scale Computing’s single node deployment option for edge workloads, and X-IO Technologies‘ neat approach to moving data from the edge to the core. But physics is still physics.

 

The Bit In Between

So back to Jason’s comment on hybrid cloud being the way it’s really all going. I agree that it’s very much a question of public cloud and on-premises, rather than one or the other. I think the missing piece for a lot of organisations, however, doesn’t necessarily lie in any one technology or application architecture. Rather, I think the key to a successful hybrid strategy sits squarely with the capability of the organization to provide consistent governance throughout the stack. In my opinion, it’s more about people understanding the value of what their company does, and the best way to help it achieve that value, than it is about whether HCI is a better fit than traditional rackmount servers connected to fibre channel fabrics. Those considerations are important, of course, but I don’t think they have the same impact on a company’s potential success as the people and politics does. You can have some super awesome bits of technology powering your company, but if you don’t understand how you’re helping the company do business, you’ll find the technology is not as useful as you hoped it would be. You can talk all you want about hybrid (and you should, it’s a solid strategy) but if you don’t understand why you’re doing what you do, it’s not going to be as effective.

Scale Computing and WinMagic Announce Partnership, Refuse to Sit Still

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Scale Computing and WinMagic recently announced a partnership improving the security of Scale’s HC3 solution. I had the opportunity to be briefed by the good folks at Scale and WinMagic and thought I’d provide a brief overview of the announcement here.

 

But Firstly, Some Background

Scale Computing announced their HC3 Cloud Unity offering in late September this year. Cloud Unity, in a nutshell, let’s you run embedded HC3 instances in Google Cloud. Coupled with some SD-WAN smarts, you can move workloads easily between on-premises infrastructure and GCP. It enables companies to perform lift and shift migrations, if required, with relative ease, and removes a lot of the complexity traditionally associated of deploying hybrid-friendly workloads in the data centre.

 

So the WinMagic Thing?

WinMagic have been around for quite some time, and offer a range of security products aimed at various sizes of organization. This partnership with Scale delivers SecureDoc CloudVM as a mechanism for encryption and key management. You can download a copy of the brochure from here. The point of the solution is to provide a secure mechanism for hosting your VMs either on-premises or in the cloud. Key management can be a pain in the rear, and WinMagic provides a fully-featured solution for this that’s easy to use and simple to manage. There’s broad support for a variety of operating environments and clients. Authentication and authorized key distribution takes place prior to workloads being deployed to ensure that the right person is accessing data from an expected place and device and there’s support for password only or multi-factor authentication.

 

Thoughts

Scale Computing have been doing some really cool stuff in the hyperconverged arena for some time now. The new partnership with Google Cloud, and the addition of the WinMagic solution, demonstrates their focus on improving an already impressive offering with some pretty neat features. It’s one thing to enable customers to get to the cloud with relative ease, but it’s a whole other thing to be able to help them secure their assets when they make that move to the cloud.

It’s my opinion that Scale Computing have been the quiet achievers in the HCI marketplace, with reported fantastic customer satisfaction and a solid range of products on offer at a very reasonable RRP. Couple this with an intelligent hypervisor platform and the ability to securely host assets in the public cloud, and it’s clear that Scale Computing aren’t interested in standing still. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next for them. If you’re after an HCI solution where you can start really (really) small and grow as required, it would be worthwhile having a chat to them.

Also, if you’re into that kind of thing, Scale and WinMagic are hosting a joint webinar on November 28 at 10:30am EST. Registration for the webinar “Simplifying Security across your Universal I.T. Infrastructure: Top 5 Considerations for Securing Your Virtual and Cloud IT Environments, Without Introducing Unneeded Complexity” can be found here.