hyper-converged infrastructure

Scale Computing recently announced the HE150 series of small edge servers. I had the chance to chat with Alan Conboy about the announcement, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

Edge, But Smaller

I’ve written in the past about additions to the HC3 Edge Platform. But those things had a rack-mount form factor. The newly announced HE150 runs on Intel NUC devices. Wait, what? That’s right, hyper-converged infrastructure on really small PCs. But don’t you need a bunch of NICs to do HC3 properly? There’s no need for backplane switch requirement, as they use some software-defined networking to tunnel the backplane network across the NIC. The HC3 platform uses less than 1GB RAM per node, and each node has 2 cores. The storage sits on an NVMe drive and you can get hold of this stuff at a retail price of around $5K US for 3 nodes.

[image courtesy of Scale Computing]

Scale at Scale?

How do you deploy these kinds of things at scale then? Conboy tells me there’s full Ansible integration, RESTful API deployment capabilities, and they come equipped with Intel AMT. In short, these things can turn up at the remote site, be plugged in, and be ready to go.

Where would you?

The HE150 solution is 100% specific to multi-site edge implementations. It’s not trying to go after workloads that would normally be serviced by the HE500 or HE1000. Where it can work though, is with:

Oil and Gas exploration – with one in each ship (they need 4-5 VMs to handle sensor data to make command decisions)
Grocery and retail chains
Manufacturing platforms
Telcos – pole-side boxes

In short, think of environments that require some amount of compute and don’t have IT people to support it.

Thoughts

I’ve been a fan of what Scale Computing has been doing with HCI for some time now. Scale’s take on making things simple across the enterprise has been refreshing. While this solution might surprise some folks, it strikes me that there’s an appetite for this kind fo thing in the marketplace. The edge is often a place where less is more, and there’s often not a lot of resources available to do basic stuff, like deploy a traditional, rackmounted compute environment. But a small, 3-node HCI cluster that can be stacked away in a stationery cupboard? That might just work. Particularly if you only need a few virtual machines to meet those compute requirements. As Conboy pointed out to me, Scale isn’t looking to use this as a replacement for the higher-preforming options it has available. Rather, this solution is perfect for highly distributed retail environments where they need to do one or two things and it would be useful if they didn’t do those things in a data centre located hundreds of kilometres away.

If you’re not that excited about Intel NUCs though, you might be happy to hear that solutions from Lenovo will be forthcoming shortly.

The edge presents a number of challenges to enterprises, in terms of both its definition and how to deal with it effectively. Ultimately, the success of solutions like this will hinge on ease of use, reliability, and whether it really is fit for purpose. The good folks at Scale don’t like to go off half-cocked, so you can be sure some thought went into this product – it’s not just a science project. I’m keen to see what the uptake is like, because I think this kind of solution has a place in the market. The HE150 is available for purchase form Scale Computing now. It’s also worth checking out the Scale Computing presentations at Tech Field Day 20.

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.