Several years ago (in the waning days of the last decade and early days of this one), we here at Scale decided to revolutionize how datacenters for the SMB and Mid Market should function. In the spirit of “perfection is not attained when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to remove”, we set out to take a clean sheet of paper approach to how highly available virtualization SHOULD work. We started by asking a simple question – If you were to design, from the ground up, a virtual infrastructure, would it look even remotely like the servers plus switches plus SAN plus hypervisor plus management beast known as the inverted pyramid of doom? The answer, of course, was no, it would not. In that legacy approach, each piece exists as an answer/band-aid/patch to the problems inherent in the previous iteration of virtualization, resulting in a Rube-Goldbergian machine of cost and complexity that took inefficiency to an entirely new level.

There had to be a better way. What if we were to eliminate the SAN entirely, but maintain the flexibility it provided in the first place (enabling high availability)? What if we were to eliminate the management servers entirely by making the servers (or nodes) talk directly to each other? What if we were to base the entire concept around a self aware, self healing, self load balancing cluster of commodity X64 server nodes? What if we were to take the resource and efficiency gains made in this approach and put them directly into running workloads instead of overhead thereby significantly improving density while lowering cost dramatically? We sharpened our pencils and got to work. The end result was our HC3 platform.

Now, at this same time, a few other companies were working on things that were superficially similar, but designed to tackle an entirely different problem. These other companies set out to be a “better delivery mechanism for VMWare in the large enterprise environment”. They did this by taking the legacy solution SAN component and virtualizing an instance of SAN (storage protocols, CPU and RAM resource consumption and all) as a virtual machine running on each and every server in their environment. The name they used for this across the industry was “Server SAN”.

Server SAN, while an improvement in some ways over the legacy approach to virtualization, was hardly what we here at Scale had created. What we had done was the elimination of all those pieces of overhead. We had actually converged the entire environment by collapsing those old legacy stacks (not virtualizing them and replicating them over and over). Server San just didn’t describe what we do. In an effort to create a proper name for what we had created, we took some of our early HC3 Clusters to Arun Taneja and the Taneja group back in 2011 and walked them through our technology. After many hours in that meeting with their team and ours, the old networking term “Hyperconverged” was resurrected specifically to describe Scale’s HC3 platform – the actual convergence of all of the stacks (storage, compute, virtualization, orchestration, self-healing, management, et.al.) and elimination of everything that didn’t need to be there in the legacy approach to virtualization, rather than the semi-converged approach that the Server San vendors had taken.

Like everything else in this business, the term caught fire, and it’s actual meaning became obscured through it’s being co-opted by a multiplicity of other vendors stretching it to fit their products – I am fairly sure I saw a “hyperconverged” coffee maker the other week, but now you know where the term actually came from and what it really means from the people that coined it’s modern use in the first place.

Original post: http://blog.scalecomputing.com/the-origin-of-modern-hyperconvergence/

This is my third and final post in this series. I’ve covered SAN and server virtualization and now I’d like to share my thoughts on the challenges of SMB IT shops vs enterprise IT.

To start, I should probably give some context on the size of an SMB IT shop. Since we are talking about infrastructure, I am really referring to IT departments that have less than a handful of administrators assigned to infrastructure, with the most common IT shop allocating only one or two resources to infrastructure. Since the makeup of businesses varies so much in terms of numbers of IT users vs. external services, etc, all of the lines do get a little blurred. It is not a perfect science but here’s hoping my points will be clear enough.

SMB

Small and medium businesses, sometimes referred to as small and midmarket, have some very unique challenges compared to larger enterprise customers. One of those challenges is being a jack of all trades, master of none. Now, there are some very talented and dedicated administrators out there who can master many aspects of IT over time but often the day to day tasks of keeping the IT ship afloat make it impossible for administrators to gain expertise in any particular area. There just isn’t the budget nor training time to have enough expertise on staff. Without a large team of persons who bring together many types of expertise, administrators must make use of technology solutions that help them do more with less.

Complexity is the enemy of the small IT department during all phases of the solution lifecycle including implementation, management, and maintenance. Complex solutions that combine a number of different vendors and products can be more easily managed in the enterprise but become a burden on smaller IT shops that must stretch their limited knowledge and headcount. Projects then turn into long nights and weekends and administrators are still expected to manage normal business hour tasks. Some administrators use scripting to automate much of their IT management and end up with a highly customized environment that becomes hard to migrate away from when business needs evolve.

Then there is the issue of brain drain. Smaller IT shops cannot easily absorb the loss of key administrators who may be the only ones intimately familiar with how all of the systems interconnect and operate. When those administrators leave for whatever reason, suddenly at times, they leave a huge gap in knowledge that cannot easily be filled. This is much less of a problem in the enterprise where an individual administrator is one of a team and has many others who can fill in that gap. The loss of a key administrator in the SMB can be devastating to the IT operations going forward.

To combat brain drain in the SMB, those IT shops benefit from fewer vendors and products to simplify the IT environment, requiring less specialized training and with the ability of a new administrator quickly coming up to speed on the technology in use. High levels of automation built in to the vendor solution for common IT tasks and simple, unified management tools help the transition from one administrator to the next.

For SMB, budgets can vary wildly from shoestring on up. The idea of doing more with less is much more on the minds of SMB administrators. SMBs are not as resilient to unexpected costs associated with IT disasters and other types of unexpected downtime. Support is one of the first lines of insurance for SMBs and dealing with multiple vendors and support run-around can be paralyzing at those critical moments, especially for SMBs who could not budget for the higher levels of support. Having resilient, reliable infrastructure with responsive, premium support can make a huge difference in protecting SMBs from various types of failure and disaster that could be critical to business success.

Ok, enough about the SMB, time to discuss the big guys.

Enterprise

Both SMB and enterprise organizations have processes, although the level of reliance on process in much higher in the enterprise. An SMB organization can typically adapt process easily and quickly to match technology, where an enterprise organization can be much more fixed in process and technology must be changed to match the process. The enterprise therefore employs a large number of administrators, developers, consultants, and other experts to create complex systems to support their business processes.

The enterprise can withstand more complexity because they are able to have more experts on staff who can focus management efforts on single silos of infrastructure such as storage, servers, virtualization, security, etc. With multiple administrators assigned to each silo, there is guaranteed management coverage to deal with any unexpected problems. Effectively, the IT department (or departments) in the enterprise have a high combined level of expertise and manpower, or have the budget to bring in outside consultants and service providers to fill these gaps as a standard practice.

Unlike with SMB, simplicity is not necessarily a benefit to the enterprise since they need the flexibility to adapt to business process. Infrastructure can therefore be a patchwork of systems serving different needs from high performance computing, data warehousing, data distribution, disaster recovery, etc. Solutions for these enterprise operations must be extensible and adaptable to the user process to meet the compliance and business needs of these organizations.

Enterprise organizations are usually big enough that they can tolerate different types of failures better than SMB, although as we have seen in recent news, even companies like Delta Airlines are not immune to near catastrophic failures. Still, disk failures or server failures that could bring an SMB to a standstill might barely cause a ripple in a large enterprise given the size of their operations.

Summary

The SMB benefits from infrastructure simplicity because it helps eliminate a number of challenges and unplanned costs. For the enterprise, the focus is more on flexibility, adaptability, and extensibility where business processes reign supreme. IT challenges can be more acute in the SMB simply because the budgets and resources are more limited in both headcount and expertise. Complex infrastructure designed for the enterprise is not always going to translate into effective or viable solutions for SMB. Solution providers need to be aware that the SMB may need more than just a scaled down version of an enterprise solution.

@JeffReady

CRN Exclusive: Scale Computing CEO on Attacking VMware's Virtualization Licensing Model and Saving Customers $32M

The Red-Hot Hyper-Converged Market

Jeff Ready, the CEO of Scale Computing, the hyper-converged, virtualization appliance maker which just launched its first broad-based, multi-tiered channel program, spoke with CRN about the company's relentless drive to get customers to dump VMware, the astronomical savings in VMware licensing fees that Scale has delivered to customers and the stark differences between Scale and competitors SimpliVity and Nutanix.

Ready, a serial entrepreneur, has over the last two decades started a number of companies that reduce the complexity and cost of computing including Corvigo, an anti-spam filtering company, and Scale, which was built from the ground up as a hyper-converged, virtualization game-changer for small and midsize customers.

Under Ready's leadership, Scale sales more than doubled over the last year with more than 1,500 customers now running the company's HC3 appliances which integrate storage, server and virtualization under its patented HyperCore Software platform.

Read more on CRN!

https://youtu.be/MPBDTwk1Dlg
“With Scale, you’re an immediate product matter expert.”

Blake Vanee, Director of Business Process, Vanee Foods, Chicago

2016 was an exciting year for hyperconverged infrastructure and an amazing year for Scale Computing. We’re working hard to continue making HC3 the most advanced IT infrastructure solution on the market. Join us on Thursday, February 16th at 2:00 PM (EST) to discuss what’s new including:

• New Releases
• Recent Announcements
• Our Newest Features
• New Services
• A Preview of What is Coming Soon

Not able to make the webinar? Register anyway to receive a link to the recording delivered to your inbox following the event!

To coincide with our webinar that will start in a few minutes, we have a PDF that highlights the latest "What's New in the HC3"

Newest HC3 Models
Over the past year we have introduced a number of new models to our HC3 family. First, we introduced the HC2150 and HC4150 which were the first to include flash storage. Then we retooled our HC1000 family with the HC1100 and HC1150 models to bring you HC3 and flash storage at an even more affordable price. Then we increased maximum storage capacity on nearly all of our models with new 8TB SAS drives. Most recently, we announced the new HC1150D which includes dual processors and increased capacity over the HC1150.

Disaster Recovery Planning Service
If you want a comprehensive disaster recovery plan for your HC3 system, this new service is for you. Including planning, identifying dependencies, prioritizing workloads, and DR testing, this service will make sure you are meeting or exceeding your SLAs for recovery and minimizing data loss. It never hurts to have expert help when planning for disaster.

Premium Installation Service
HC3 is known for being extremely easy to install and use, but for those who want to hit the ground running with HC3, we now offer a Premium Installation Service facilitated by our ScaleCare support engineers. This service includes planning, prerequisites, priority scheduling, and deep-dive technical training. With this training, you will be an HC3 expert by the time installation is complete.

Single Node Appliance Configuration
HC3 used to require a 3-node cluster as the minimum configuration but not anymore. Now, a single appliance can be deployed all by itself. While a cluster is preferable for high availability and primary production, a single appliance can be more than sufficient for disaster recovery, remote or branch offices, or even for the small “s” of the SMB.

Bulk Actions
You can now perform a number of actions against groups of VMs in the HC3 web interface. The action will be performed against all VMs displayed, so you can use the tagging and filtering capabilities to create groups that you commonly need to perform the same action against. The available actions include clone, snapshot, delete, and power options (power on, shutdown, etc).

SSD Retrofit Service
You can now retrofit your HC2000/2100 and HC4000/4100 nodes with SSD storage to take advantage of faster I/O and HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering (HEAT) technology. Our ScaleCare Support Team will assist you in replacing spinning HDD drives with new SSD drives to scale up your nodes and turn I/O to 11.

What’s New in HC3

Workspot VDI 2.0 Integration
We are pleased to announce that we have teamed up with Workspot to offer a validated VDI solution with integration for HC3. Both solutions focus on removing complexity from infrastructure and with with Workspot, VDI can be deployed on HC3 in as little as 60 minutes with as many as 175 desktops on an HC1150 cluster.

HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering (HEAT)
In order to make the most efficient use of the new flash storage within HyperCore, we designed an automated, intelligent mechanism to allocate storage across the tiers. Not only do we begin allocating to flash by default for each virtual disk, but we allow you to tune the relative priority with a simple, intuitive slider bar. This tuning capacity allows you to increase the allocation of flash for workloads that have higher I/O requirements while decreasing the allocation for virtual disks and workloads that have minimal I/O needs.

ScaleCare Remote Recovery Service
We are pleased to announce a disaster recovery service that allows (for a fee) VMs from an HC3 cluster to be replicated and failed over to a remote, secure datacenter for disaster recovery. For those customers without a second site or second cluster that need reliable DR for their critical workloads, this service addresses that need on a per VM basis. It starts as low as $100 per VM per month.

Per VM Real-Time Statistics
Not only have we added a new IOPS statistic to the primary web interface dashboard for your cluster, but we have added per VM storage statistics for capacity utilization and IOPS that are updated in real-time. You’ve always been able to see the storage capacity usage for the entire cluster, but now you can see that statistic for each individual VM right on the top layer interface view. The new IOPS statistic will not only be useful for new and existing users on our traditional cluster nodes, but more so by users with flash storage to help tune virtual disks for maximum IOPS.

The AWS S3 outage last Tuesday confirmed the worst fears of many that bigger is not better. Three hours of outage for 150,000 or so websites and other services, because of some internal issues at S3. What we saw yet again yesterday was that a massive data center like S3 proved to be no more reliable than private data centers happily achieving five 9’s.

The real issue here is not that there was an outage. The outage was unfortunately just an inevitability that proves no infrastructure is invulnerable. No, the real issue is the perception that a cloud service like AWS can be made too big to fail. Instead, what we saw was that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Now, I like public cloud services and I use them often. In fact, I used Google Docs to type a draft of this very blog post. However, would I trust my business critical data to public cloud? Probably not. Maybe I am old fashioned but I have had enough issues with outages of either internet services or cloud services to make me a believer in investing in private infrastructure.

The thing about public cloud is that it offers simplicity. Just login and manage VMs or applications without ever having to worry about a hard drive failure or a power supply going wonky. And that simplicity comes at a premium with the idea that you will save money by only using what you need without having to over-provision, like you would expect to do with buying your own gear. That seems like wishful thinking to me, because in my experience, managing costs with cloud computing can be a tricky business and it can be a full-time job to make sure you aren’t spending more than you intend.

Is the cost of managing private infrastructure even more? You must buy servers, storage, hypervisors, management solutions, and backup/DR, right? Not anymore. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is about delivering infrastructure that is pre-integrated and so easy to manage that the experience of using it is the same as using cloud. In fact, just last week I talked about how it really is a private cloud solution.

What is the benefit of owning your own infrastructure? First: Control. You get to control your fate with the ability to better plan for and respond to disaster and failure, mitigating risk to your level of satisfaction. No one wants to be sitting on their hands, waiting, while their cloud provider is supposedly working hard to fix the outage. Second, Cost. Costs are more predictable with HCI and there is less over-provisioning than with traditional virtualization solutions. There are also no ongoing monthly premium costs for the third party who is supposed to be eliminating the risk of downtime.

Cloud just isn’t the indestructible castle in the sky that we were meant to believe it was. Nothing is, but with HCI, you get your own castle and you get to rule it the way you see fit. You won’t be stuck waiting to see if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put Humpty back together again.

At Scale Computing, we do our best not only to build the best solutions for our customers, but also to explain why our solutions really are the best to those still deciding on a solution. In reality, no one can explain it as well as one of our actual customers.

This week we have the opportunity to share the Scale Computing experience of Nathan Beam of Bridgetree in his own words, on his own blog. Here is the link:

Simply Hyper-converged – An Overview of Scale Computing’s Easy-To-Use HC3 Virtualization Platform

Simply Hyper-converged – An Overview of Scale Computing’s Easy-To-Use HC3 Virtualization Platform
Just to pull a quick quote: “My own experience and pretty much that of every other customer testifies to the fact that we all love our product. I searched long and hard trying to find unhappy owners of HC3 equipment… to this day I still don’t know if any exist.”

We look forward to sharing more of our user experiences with you in the future.

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/one-customers-experience-with-scale-computing/

This Friday is BACKUP DAY

Businesses around the globe stand to lose thousands, tens of thousand, or even hundreds of thousands for as little as one hour of unplanned downtime of their IT services.

Join Scale Computing's product team this Friday, March 31 at 2:00 PM (EDT) to learn more about:

• the real consequences of an inadequate backup/DR solution.
• how hyperconvergence can make your workloads more highly available.
• what Scale Computing is doing to provide all the backup/DR you need in the HC3 virtualization platform.

Learn More About the Event

Register Now

Educational institutions are constantly challenged to keep up with technological innovation. Students need access to modern technology to prepare for a competitive job market and institutions need technology to remain efficient and effective. As virtualization technology solutions offered by VMware and Microsoft have proven to be complex and costly, educational institutions have begun switching to hyperconverged infrastructure solutions like HC3 from Scale Computing to modernize.

.......

From primary to higher education, Scale Computing is meeting IT needs with high marks. Following will be several examples and case studies in education for you to examine.

Read more on the Scale Blog.

@Scale will be showing its award winning hyperconverged HC3 platform at IP Expo Manchester on stand M252.

We'll be at M252 where you can join us to talk about how your business can lower the complexity of virtualization with the Scale HC3 appliance family. Our booth will be geared towards the SMB market and disruptive enterprises and will focus on agility and flexibility in changing requirements. So if you are Manchester later this week, we'd love to see you.

Please see further details below:

Date: April 26th – 27th 2017
Stand: M252
Location: Manchester Central

Tweet this: Visit @scalecomputing at #IPExpo at stand M252 #hyperconvergedinfrastructure

A bit late bringing this one to you, but here we go.

On May 4th, we celebrated the culturally iconic Star Wars universe. While the story of Star Wars takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the technology is futuristic even by our present standards, 40 years after the first movie premiered. Star Wars has captured the imaginations of billions of people over the years who have dreamed of living in such a technology-rich world of droids, lightsabers, speeder bikes, and more.

Perhaps the most important technology featured in Star Wars is faster than light (FTL) travel. The ability to travel through hyperspace not only allowed for the galactic empire to exist but also made for exciting chase scenes and iconic special effects.

While we don’t seem to be close to developing FTL travel today, the technology to go faster in everything we do is all around us. At Scale Computing, not only are we a bunch of Star Wars geeks, we are innovators working to make your IT infrastructure faster. That is nowhere more apparent than in our storage architecture.

While our competitors are still using storage architectures based on SAN and NAS technologies that have been around over 20 years. We knew there was a better way and faster way to deliver storage. Instead of virtualizing technologies that were never built for virtualization in the first place, we are starting from the ground up, ditching multiple layers of storage controllers, file systems, and protocols that are causing inefficiencies in data centers around the world.

You see, many virtualization solutions start with a SAN or NAS technology onto which another virtual storage layer is applied, mimicking SAN, often referred to as vSAN. Then finally, the actual file system for the virtual machine is added. These technologies deploy a variety of both physical controllers and virtual storage appliances (VSAs) to make it all work. Not with Scale Computing.

The HC3 virtualization platform doesn’t use any extra storage controllers or VSAs, no extra file systems, and no extra protocols. The only file system in play with HC3 is the one used by the guest OS installed in the virtual machine you create for your applications. This makes our storage extremely efficient and that was even before we decided to add solid state flash drives into the architecture. Our architecture has allowed us to implement flash a little differently than the competition and we have a sense of humor about it too.

Other storage technologies desperately needed flash storage as a cache to overcome the inefficiencies they had already built into their architectures. With HC3, we didn’t need a flash storage cache so we just implemented flash as a storage tier to actually store your data. Then, where your data is stored, you get to control how much flash you use on a per virtual disk basis as illustrated above. Again, there are no controllers or VSAs needed for our tiered flash storage or all flash storage architecture.

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) technologies like 3D XPoint are designed for speeds 1000x faster than NAND (the current primary flash architecture). In order to achieve these 1000x speeds, NVMe must bypass traditional storage controllers and protocols that would only serve as a bottleneck because they were never designed for the speeds capable with this new flash storage. So these existing storage architectures designed around old SAN and NAS technologies are going to have to change completely for NVMe. HC3 doesn’t have all of these old controllers, VSAs, or protocols to shed to implement NVMe.

Speed matters. Architecture matters. The future matters and your systems need to be ready for the future. Don’t go with an architecture that is going to need to scrapped when you need NVMe speeds in a couple years. Future proof your data center with technology designed to eliminate complexity and inefficiency: HC3.

Twenty years ago, everything in IT was hard. Installing a server was hard. Setting up a database was hard. Networking machines was hard. Companies that wanted computers to do pretty much anything beyond basic printing needed a lot of expertise, time and effort and, let’s be realistic, even printing wasn’t all that easy in a lot of cases.

Today, many things are different. Networking is very easy. Installing a server is very easy. Setting up a database, easy. The basics are really not that hard.

Your virtualization should be easy today, too. We are really past the point where virtualization should be a challenge for small businesses to set up and use. Businesses spending time and resources trying to learn details about their hypervisors, examining different storage systems, talking to many vendors, researching tools and software becomes a very expensive exercise that ultimately is highly error prone due to a lack of experience and resources since most companies will only do this once to make a single, long term decisions. The cost of making the purchasing decision might be extremely high.

But we don’t need things to be like this today. Oh sure, in a very large company where extremely special needs these decisions make sense. In a company like that, we would expect that there is a team of virtualization and storage experts who research and work with many different products and vendors full time and are not making one time decisions, but instead doing so frequently. For them, this approach makes sense as it allows them to fine tune their purchasing decisions for different use cases.

For the rest of us in the smaller business market, whether a very small company of just a few people to even relatively large ones with many larger servers and hundreds or maybe thousands of employees, there really is no value to such a complicated purchasing process. The cost of that decision making it high, and the risks of making mistakes are high.

This is where hyperconvergence comes in. Hyperconvergence has the potential to take many elements that are often challenging to the non-enterprise IT market such as hypervisor selection, storage design, high availability and so forth and rolls them into a single, supported entity with the big, hard decisions already having not just made, but already implemented.

Hyperconvergence removes the guesswork and the expensive decision-making from IT and instead makes it simple and fast. Even additional management tools, like backups, are often prequalified and tested so that a smaller, vendor assured list is common.

Not only does choosing and implementing a business architecture become vastly simpler, but long term support does as well. Instead of many vendors and internal design decisions, a single vendor with standard designs means that you know who to call for support and they understand your system and how to support it.

The assumption that everything will be hard no longer needs to be true, even if it is hard for some IT pros to believe. Hyperconvergence applies the concept of ease-of-use to the core infrastructure components of your network.

No one relishes the idea of changing out IT infrastructure, except maybe consultants and contractors who are willing to get paid big bucks to help you do it. It can be hard enough deciding when to make the change, and then shopping for new solutions. Then there is the new implementation. Migrating workloads from older systems to newer systems has historically been a minefield of issues and delays.

Does that image reflect any of your own experiences?

Implementing a new IT infrastructure doesn’t have to be difficult, and you don’t need those expensive consultants and contractors if you choose the right solution. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is designed to be simpler, easier to implement, and easier to scale out. If you choose the right HCI solution, like HC3 from Scale Computing, it can be almost too easy to believe.

HC3 is an appliance-based approach to virtualization that has preconfigured all of the storage, compute, and virtualization needed for IT infrastructure. A cluster of HC3 appliances can be up and running with live VMs in under an hour. If you don’t believe us, just listen to the Scale Computing customers.

The next question you will undoubtedly have is about migration of workloads. ScaleCare support assists customers with migration using our HC3 Move solution, powered by Double-Take Move. Workloads can be migrated from any physical, virtual, or even cloud platforms to HC3 with almost no downtime. HC3 Move makes moving workloads both simple and efficient.

With HCI, implementation simply does not need to be difficult. Don’t let the fear of a complex implementation delay your decision to update your infrastructure to a solution that will be easier to manage, maintain, and ultimately save you on total cost of ownership. Check out HC3 from Scale Computing to see how you can refresh with ease and eliminate complex and difficult IT infrastructure challenges from your future.

CRN has recently had a round up of the coolest new tech in the HC space for 2017 up until now and our new HC3 devices made the list.

Today we announced HC3 Cloud Unity℠, a new partnership with Google that has been two years in the making. Both companies have committed significant resources and technology to make this happen, and we’re super excited to announce it

So what is it? Simply put, HC3 Cloud Unity puts the resources on Google’s cloud onto your local LAN. It becomes a component in your infrastructure, addressable locally, which your applications can interoperate with in the exact same way they would with any local system.

The impact on operations is significant. For example, this takes the concept of cloud-based disaster recovery to a whole new level, because again, those cloud resources are part of the local LAN. This means the networking nightmare that is typically present in DR is gone, and an application which fails over to the cloud resource will retain the same IP address that it had before — and all the other systems, users, and applications will continue to communicate with the “failed” resource as though it never moved.

This also enables you to think about DR in a completely different way. Usually we think of DR as “site failure” — and certainly that could hold true here. But, in addition, we can now think of using this type of cloud-failover for individual apps and not necessarily entire sites. Again, since those apps failover into the same LAN, retaining IP addressing, they will work in either location.

Those are two concepts, simplified networking and DR, that we think customers will gain immediate benefit from. In addition, those examples should point you to something very new and exciting: true hybrid cloud. With everything on the same network, an application which may use several VMs can have those VMs spread across both their on-premises systems and the cloud, without any change in configuration or use. Furthermore, moving an application to the cloud is as simple as live migrating a VM between on-prem servers, because from a networking perspective, the cloud is “on prem.”

To accomplish this we have combined technology with Google, and both sides have also introduced new tech. On the Google side, this uses the resources of their cloud combined with newly launched nested virtualization technology. On the Scale side, we are using the HC3 platform with Hypercore and our SCRIBE SDS layers, and have now added SD-WAN capabilities to automatically bridge the networks together into the same LAN.

The end result, in-line with all Scale products, is extreme simplicity. These cloud resources are there on your LAN. Any VM can access them, use them, and move in or out of the cloud without reconfiguration or cloud awareness. We know our customers are often running a wide mix of workloads, some of which may be older, legacy systems. Whether old or new, these apps can now run in the cloud with a simple click in the UI.

When we first were approached by Google two years ago, we both immediately saw the similarities of our platforms and approaches. From KVM to software-defined storage, there was a lot that was already “in alignment” that enabled our platforms to work so seamlessly together.

Delivering this type of hybrid cloud functionality is the road we’ve been driving our customers down for a long time. From first coining the term “hyperconvergence” in 2012, to now bringing customers into this cloud-converged environment, we will continue to innovate to meet customer needs while maintaining the ease of use and interoperability that is fundamental to the Scale platform.

@JeffReady

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/hc3-cloud-unity-with-google-cloud-platform/

Here is the official press release for those interesting in the drier marketing copy:

https://www.scalecomputing.com/press_releases/2075/

Scale Computing Collaborates with Google Cloud to Remove Barriers to Cloud Computing with Hybrid Cloud Mobility
Scale Computing, a market leader in hyperconverged solutions, announced that it is working with Google to develop a hybrid cloud solution that makes it easy for organizations, including channel partners and MSPS, to move application workloads freely in the cloud or on-premises.

The new offering, called HC3 Cloud Unity allows an organization’s apps to use resources in the cloud and on-prem at the same time, and enables apps solely created for on-prem to now run on Google Cloud Platform.

HC3 Cloud Unity combines the private cloud capabilities of Scale’s HC3 hyperconverged platform, SCRIBE software-defined-storage, and new SD-WAN capabilities with Google Compute Engine, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering for Google Cloud Platform. HC3 also leverages Google’s recently released nested virtualization support.

With HC3 running both on-premises and in Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Unity creates a virtual LAN that seamlessly bridges an on-prem local LAN with the private virtual network on GCP. This allows IT organizations to connect to the cloud in real time from their on-premises infrastructure that combines storage, compute, and virtualization in a single solution.

“One of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption for IT organizations is the inability to move applications to and from the cloud,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing. “With HC3 Cloud Unity, Google and Scale have laid a massive two-way speedway across the HC3 clusters on-premises and HC3 on Google Cloud Platform. This network means organizations no longer have to use or create different apps for the cloud, they can utilize their apps created for on-prem to run in the Google Cloud, which will be a game changer of end users, channel partners and MSPs globally.”

“Companies still have a lot of legacy applications built with a different set of tools,” said Adam Massey, Director, Strategic Technology Partners, Google Cloud. “The challenge is finding ways to work in a hybrid environment as you migrate and figure out what to retool and what to just pick up and move. Our work with Scale Computing is making this process easier for companies that haven’t been able to leverage the cloud to its full potential.”

“IT agility is what helps our company retain a competitive edge in our industry. One of the biggest hurdles we had yet to overcome was the ability to fully embrace the costs and flexibility of the cloud,” said Mike O’Neil at HydraDyne. “A solution that helps us move legacy applications and virtual machines back and forth from the cloud when we need it is a complete game changer.”

Scale Computing’s HC3 platform that was launched in 2007, brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. The company currently has over 2000 customers globally.

Google Cloud Platform is an IaaS that supports the HC3 platform and virtual machines and applications that run on HC3. With HC3 running both on-premises and in Google Compute Engine, IT organizations can connect the cloud with on-premises infrastructure like never before.

Cloud Unity is available in Q4 2017.

New Partnership Means WinMagic Encryption and Intelligent Key Management Now Available With Scale HC3 Platform

INDIANAPOLIS and MISSISSAUGA, Ontario, Oct. 24, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WinMagic and Scale Computing have announced a collaboration to target enterprises who need high performance, highly secure access to their data across their unified public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The partnership sees Scale’s high availability HC3 hyperconverged platform combined with WinMagic’s SecureDoc CloudVM encryption and intelligent key management solution, allowing organizations to secure their cloud workloads while focusing on driving business value.

“Hyperconvergence is a rapidly exploding market and is set to displace traditional server and storage models,” states James LaPalme, VP of Cloud Solutions, WinMagic. “The future lies in turnkey cloud solutions, like Scale’s hyperconvergence platform, and we’re excited to be able to add the powerful security benefits of our SecureDoc CloudVM solution into Scale’s HC3 platform -- providing customers greater control and certainty over their data security with an intelligent enterprise-controlled, cloud-agnostic key management and encryption solution.”

The partnership will be further enhanced by HC3 Cloud Unity, Scale’s collaboration with Google, announced on September 28, whom together developed a hybrid cloud solution that makes it easy for organizations to move application workloads freely in the cloud or on-premises. Scale’s WinMagic partnership ensures constant data security with these moving workloads through intelligent encryption capabilities.

“Our customers want control of their systems, whether they are in the cloud or on-premise. But historically the cloud has been one of the least secure places. Add the issue of encrypting and decrypting data as you move it to the cloud, and it’s clear utilizing a cloud into an organization’s environment is challenging,” said Stanton Girod, AR Consultant Group. “Scale Computing and WinMagic are empowering organizations to take back control. Utilizing the recently launched HC3 Cloud Unity platform, which seamlessly bridges an on-premise local LAN with the private virtual network on Google Cloud Platform, WinMagic and Scale are ensuring customers’ data is not only secure, but that they have one end-to-end solution that can be deployed across any end point, virtualized or cloud IaaS environment.”

SecureDoc CloudVM leverages all the strengths built into WinMagic’s SecureDoc endpoint encryption to provide enterprises with a flexible and high-performing data security solution. The solution offers several features that apply intelligence to encryption, speed time to market, increase efficiency and reduce risk, such as enterprise-controlled key management.

Scale Computing’s HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running.

“The ability to control and manage data flow in and out of an organization is going to become increasingly difficult without the implementation of an enterprise solution capable of keeping ahead of security issues, emerging trends, and ever-evolving compliance regulations. Working with WinMagic puts our customers and partners in control. It also helps reduce security risks, with one simple easy to use solution, that overlays our HC3 platform, and allows users to pursue the advantages of public, private or a hybrid cloud strategy,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, Scale Computing.

The validated joint solution is available now through WinMagic and Scale reseller channel.

In development of the new partnership, Scale Computing and WinMagic will be 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 at https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14627/288033

About WinMagic
Based in Mississauga, Ontario, WinMagic provides key management for all encryption needs. With the leading SecureDoc product line, WinMagic continues to provide easy-to-use and robust data security solutions for wherever data is stored, providing enterprise grade encryption and key management policies for all operating systems. For more information, please visit www.winmagic.com or call 1-888-879-5879.

About Scale Computing
Scale Computing is the industry leader in complete hyperconverged solutions with thousands of deployments spanning from the distributed enterprise to the SMB. Driven by patented technologies, HC3 systems install in minutes, can be expanded without downtime, self-heal from failures, and automatically optimize workloads to maximize price-performance.

WinMagic Press Contact:
Jessica Mularczyk, [email protected]

Scale Press Contact:
Emily Gallagher, [email protected]

Scale is getting more and more press coverage and we want to be able to share that with everyone, but to keep it from being overwhelming, are creating a thread for collecting the small news items.

Scale Partnering with WinMagic via The Register

https://www.winmagic.com/