Scale Computing, the market leader in hyperconverged storage, server and virtualization solutions for midsized companies, today introduced a single-node configuration of its HC3 virtualization platform, designed to deliver affordable, flexible hyperconverged infrastructure for distributed enterprise and Disaster Recovery (DR) use cases.

IT departments are often challenged to deploy disaster recovery and remote office infrastructures on a tight budget while maintaining enterprise capabilities. While hyperconvergence provides a wide range of benefits, it is generally only available in multi-node clustered configurations, often over specifying the needs of DR sites or Remote/Branch Offices (ROBOs). Deploying this single node configuration alongside Scale’s HC3 clusters enables IT departments to deliver DR and remote office infrastructure on a tight budget while maintaining enterprise capabilities.

“We are seeing increasing technology demands from the SMB and midmarket sectors, in fact, 78% of SMBs are saying that technology is more important to them today than previous years,” said Anurag Agrawal, CEO, and Analyst at Techaisle. “The SMB/midmarket often do not have the means in way of budget, knowledge or IT staff to be able to implement much needed newer technologies. Techaisle’s survey shows that 72% of SMBs want IT vendors to simplify technology and 61% are ignoring some technologies due to complexity even though they may be useful for business success. Scale Computing continues to be a champion in this space allowing small to midsize companies the immediate ability to leverage the benefits of hyperconvergence, flash, analytics, VDI and DRaaS within a single platform by removing the complexity and cost normally associated with adopting these technologies.”

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 radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running.

For disaster recovery and remote availability, it is common to target a smaller infrastructure footprint to conserve budget. With the single-node appliance configuration, there is no need to maintain an entire duplicate of production infrastructure when a smaller infrastructure is enough to run critical workloads until primary sites are restored. This not only reduces the disaster recovery infrastructure cost but further simplifies disaster recovery planning by focusing on key critical workloads rather than non-essentials.

In the distributed enterprise, remote sites often only need a handful of workloads and even a minimum cluster with multiple nodes can be excessive. Because these sites often have little or no IT expertise present, the simplicity of hyperconvergence is an even greater benefit. HC3’s remote management capabilities make it even easier for the IT staff, usually located at a central office, to avoid costly travel when supporting remote sites.

“At Scale Computing, we’ve always offered HC3 in clusters of three or more appliances but we have also recognized that there are some instances we could address where even a three-node cluster is an overkill,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, and co-founder of Scale Computing. “We decided to offer a single-node appliance configuration that can be deployed alongside HC3 clusters to enable distributed enterprise and disaster recovery use cases that provide more flexibility and cost savings than traditional cluster configurations.”

Last Friday, a DDOS attack disrupted major parts of the internet in both North America and Europe. The attacks seems largely targeted on DNS provider Dyn disrupting access to major service providers such as Level 3, Zendesk, Okta, Github, Paypal, and more, according to sources like Gizmodo. This kind of botnet-driven DDOS attack is a harbinger of future attacks that can be carried out over an increasingly connected device world based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and poorly secured devices.

This disruption highlights a particular vulnerability to businesses that have chosen to rely on cloud-based services like IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS. The ability to connect to these services is critical to business operations and even though the service may be running, if users cannot connect, it is considered downtime. What is particularly scary about these attacks for small and midmarket organizations especially, is that they become victims of circumstance from attacks directed at larger targets.

As the IoT becomes more of a reality, with more and more devices of questionable security joining the internet, the potential for these attacks and their severity can increase. I recently wrote about how to compare cloud computing and on-prem hypercoverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions, and one of the decision points was reliance on the internet. So it is not only a matter of ensuring a stable internet provider, but also the stability of the internet in general with the possibility of attacks targeting a number of different services.

Organizations running services on-prem were not affected by this attack because it did not affect any internal network environments. Choosing to run infrastructure and services internally definitely mitigates the risk of outage from external forces like collateral damage from attacks on service providers. Many organizations that choose cloud services do so for simplicity and convenience because traditional IT infrastructure, even with virtualization, is complex and can be difficult to implement, particularly for small and midsize organizations. It has only been recently that hyperconverged infrastructure has made on-prem infrastructure as simple to use as the cloud.

The future is still uncertain on how organizations will ultimately balance their IT infrastructure between on-prem and cloud in what is loosely called hybrid cloud. Likely it will simply continue to evolve continuously with more emerging technology. At the moment, however, organizations have the choice of easy-to-use hyperconverged infrastructure for increased security and stability, or choose to go with cloud providers for complete hands-off management and third party reliance.

As I mentioned in my cloud vs. HCI article, there are valid reasons to go with either and the solution may likely be a combination of the two. Organizations should be aware that on-prem IT infrastructure no longer needs to be the complicated mess of server vendors, storage vendors, hypervisor vendors, and DR solution vendors. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a viable option for organizations of any size to keep services on-prem, stable, and secure against collateral DDOS damage.

Original Post: http://blog.scalecomputing.com/it-infrastructure-deploy-integrate-repeat/

Have you ever wondered if you are stuck in an IT infrastructure loop, continuously deploying the same types of components and integrating them into an overall infrastructure architecture? Servers for CPU and RAM, storage appliances, hypervisor software, and disaster recovery software/appliances are just some of the different components that you’ve put together from different vendors to create your IT infrastructure.mobius

This model of infrastructure design, combining components from different vendors, has been around for at least a couple decades. Virtualization has reduced the hardware footprint but it added one more component, the hypervisor, to the overall mix. As these component technologies like compute and storage have evolved within the rise of virtualization, they have been modified to function but have not necessarily been optimized for efficiency.

Take storage for example. SANs were an obvious fit for virtualization early on. However, layers of inefficient storage protocols and virtual storage appliances that combined the SAN with virtualization were not efficient. If not for SSD storage, the performance of these systems would be unacceptable at best. But IT continues to implement these architectures because it has been done this way for so long, regardless of the inherent inefficiencies. Luckily, the next generation of infrastructure has arrived in the form of hyperconvergence to break this routine.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines compute, storage, virtualization, and even disaster recovery into a single appliance that can be clustered for high availability. No more purchasing all of the components separately from different vendors, no more making sure all of the components are compatible, and no more dealing with support and maintenance from multiple vendors on different schedules.

Not all HCI systems are equal, though, as some still adhere to some separate components. Some use third party hypervisors that require separate licensing. Some still adhere to SAN architectures that require virtual storage appliances (VSAs) or other inefficient storage architectures requiring excessive resource overhead and require SSD storage for caching to overcome inefficiencies.

Not only does HCI reduce vendor management and complexity but when done correctly, embeds storage in the hypervisor and offers it as a direct attached, block access storage system to VM workloads. This significantly improves the I/O performance of storage for virtualization. This architecture provides excellent performance for spinning disk so when SSD is added as a second storage tier, the storage performance is greatly improved. Also, because the storage is including in the appliance, it eliminates managing a separate SAN appliance.

HCI goes even further in simplifying IT infrastructure to allow management of the whole system from a single interface. Because the architecture is managed as a single unit and prevalidated, there is no effort spent making sure the various components work together. When the system is truly hyperconverged, including the hypervisor, there is greater control in automation so that software and firmware updates can be done without disruption to running VMs. And for scaling out, new appliances can be added to a cluster without disruption as well.

The result of these simplifications and improvements of infrastructure in hyperconvergence is an infrastructure that can be deployed quickly, scaled easily, and that requires little management. It embodies many of the benefits of the cloud where the infrastructure is virtually transparent. Instead of spending time managing infrastructure, administrators can focus time managing apps and processes rather than hardware and infrastructure.

Infrastructure should no longer require certified storage experts, virtualization experts, or any kind of hardware experts. Administrators should no longer need entire weekends or month-long projects to deploy and integrate infrastructure or spend sleepless nights dealing with failures. Hyperconvergence breaks the cycle of infrastructure as a variety of different vendors and components. Instead, it makes infrastructure a simple, available, and trusted commodity.

Saw this on FB and giggled today and thought that we would share.

Wanted to add for those that might not recognize the name that WorkSpot is a new VDI vendor and we will be hearing about their VDI offering.

Hyperconvergence is the combination of storage, compute, and virtualization. In a traditional virtualization architecture, combining these three components from different vendors can be complex and unwieldy without the right number of experts and administrators. When hyperconverged into a single solution, the complexity can be eliminated, if done correctly.

At Scale Computing we looked at the traditional architecture to identify the complexity we wanted to eliminate. The storage architecture that used SAN or NAS storage for virtualization turned out to be very complex. In order to translate storage from the SAN or NAS to a virtual machine, we counted 7 layers of object files, file systems, and protocols through which I/O had to traverse to go from the VM to the hardware. Why was this the case?

Because the storage system and the hypervisor were from different vendors, and not designed specifically to work with each other, they needed these layers of protocol translation to integrate. The solution at Scale Computing for our HC3 was to own the hypervisor (HyperCore OS) and the storage system (SCRIBE) so we could eliminate these extra layers and make storage work with VMs just like direct attached storage works with a traditional server. I call it a Block Access, Direct Attached Storage System because I like the acronym.

Why didn’t other “hyperconverged” vendors do the same? Primarily because they are not really hyperconverged and they don’t own the hypervisor. As with traditional virtualization architectures, the problem of the storage and hypervisor being from different vendors prevents efficiently integrated storage for VMs. These are storage systems being designed to support one or more third party hypervisors. These solutions generally use virtual storage appliances (VSAs) with more or less the same storage architecture as the traditional virtualization I mentioned earlier.

VSAs not only add to the inefficiency but they consume CPU and RAM resources that could otherwise be used by VM workloads. To overcome these inefficiencies, these solutions use flash storage for caching to avoid performance issues. In some cases, these solutions have added extra processing cards to their hardware nodes to offload processing. Without being able to provide efficient storage on commodity hardware, they just can’t compete with the low price AND storage efficiency of the HC3.

The efficiency of design for HC3 performance and low price is only part of the story. We also designed the storage to combine all of the disks in a cluster into a single pool that is wide striped across the cluster for redundancy and high availability. This pooling also allows for complete flexibility of storage usage across all nodes. The storage pool can contain both SSD and HDD tiers and both tiers are wide striped, highly available, and accessible across the entire virtualization cluster, even on nodes that may have no physical SSD drives.

To keep the tiering both simple and efficient, we designed our own automated tiering mechanism to automatically utilize the SSD storage tier for the blocks of data with the highest I/O. By default, the storage will optimize the SSD tier for the best overall storage efficiency without anything to manage. We wanted to eliminate the idea that someone would need a degree or certification in storage to use virtualization.

We did recognize that users might occasionally need some control over storage performance so we implemented a simple tuning mechanism that can be used to give each disk in a cluster a relative level of SSD utilization priority within the cluster. This means you can tune a disk up or down, on the fly, if you know that disk requires less or more I/O and SSD than other disks. You don’t need to know how much SSD it needs, but only that it needs less or more than other disks in the cluster and the automation takes care of the rest. We included a total of 12 levels of prioritization from 0-11 or no SSD and scaling to 11 for putting all data on SSD if available.

The result of all of the design considerations for HC3 at Scale Computing is simplicity for efficiency, ease of use, and low cost. We’re different and we want to be. It’s as simple as that.

Original Post: http://blog.scalecomputing.com/scale-computing-keeps-storage-simple-and-efficient/

@dafyre said in Introducing the Single Node Scale HC3 Appliance:

Will end-users be able to grow slowly? IE: Grow from one node to 2... and then eventually buy a third?

or would it be a jump straight from 1 node to 3 nodes?

Unfortunately at this time there is no means of growing from one to two. The jump is from one to three and one node at a time from then on. This is because of the need of a witness to avoid split brain of the cluster. One node avoids this by not having high availabilty, three and more nodes handle this by always having a witness. At two nodes there are complications that do not exist otherwise. So at this time, there is no two node option.

Except, of course, if you were in a situation where two nodes was useful through replication. That works with two nodes.

Since the news was quietly leaked here the other day, we wanted to take a moment and tell you about the new, single node Scale HC3 appliance and officially answer questions as they may arise. Scale Computing now offers our Scale HC3 platform in a single node configuration. This allows customers to deploy the Scale HC3 to situations where the capacity or high availability of the three node (or greater) cluster is not warranted such as ROBO (remote office / branch office) locations and SMB or even SOHO (small office / home office) customers that cannot justify the cost of high availability but do want Scale's flexibility, support and ease of use.

The single node configuration comes with the same easy to use all inclusive management interface, complete support and advanced storage layer that you expect from Scale, just in a smaller package without high availability. We hope that this is of interest to many small businesses or company divisions that would benefit from all that Scale offers but have been unable to do so due to the entry point of having to have three nodes for a minimum cluster.

Customers starting with a single node configuration will be able to transparently upgrade to three or more nodes when they time comes for them to grow their environments, as well.

Single node configurations can replicate with other single node configurations (making a two node configuration possible in some ways) as well as with high availability cluster configurations making them very well suited to remote offices.

Pricing: An official price list is not available yet, but the single node configuration is priced as the same as the per node prices of the existing cluster configurations. The single node configuration is only an update to our software to allow for single node operation and not new hardware, so the single nodes are the same as individual nodes in a cluster. The single node configuration, therefore, starts at just 33% the price of our normal starting price for a three node cluster.

One of the questions we often get for our HC3 platform is, “Can it be used for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)?” Yes, of course, it can. In addition to solutions we support like RDS or Citrix, we are very excited about our partnership with Workspot and their VDI 2.0 solution. But first, I want to explain a bit about why we think VDI on HC3 makes so much sense.

VDI greatly benefits from simplicity in infrastructure. The idea behind VDI is to reduce both infrastructure management and cost by moving workloads from the front end to the bank end infrastructure. This makes it much easier to control resource utilization and manage images. HC3 provides that simple infrastructure that from box to running VMs takes less than an hour. Also, the entire firmware and software including hypervisor can be updated or scaled out with additional capacity without downtime. Your desktops will never be as highly available as on HC3. Simple, scalable, and available are the ideas HC3 is built on.

So why Workspot on HC3? Workspot brought together some of the original creators of VDI to reinvent it as a next generation solution.The CTO of Workspot is one of the founding engineers to code the VMware View VDI product! What makes it innovative though? By leveraging cloud management infrastructure, Workspot simplifies VDI management for the IT generalist while supporting BYOD for the modern workplace. Workspot on HC3 can be deployed in under an hour, making it possible to deploy a full VDI solution in less than a day.

We did validation testing with Workspot on HC3and were able to run 175 desktop VMs on a 3-node HC1150 cluster using LoginVSI as a benchmark for performance. We also validated an 3-node HC4150 cluster with 360 desktops with similar results. You can see a more detailed description of the reference architecture here. By adding more nodes, and even additional clusters, the capacity can be expanded almost infinitely but more importantly, just as much as you need, when you need it. We think these results speak for themselves as positioning this solution as a perfect fit for the midmarket, where HC3 already shines.

Maybe you’ve been considering VDI but have been hesitant because of the added complexity of having to create even more traditional virtualization infrastructure in your datacenter. It doesn’t have to be that way. Workspot and Scale Computing are both in the business of reducing complexity and cost to make these solutions more accessible and more affordable. Just take a look and you’ll see why we continue to do things differently than everyone else.

Click here for the press release.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/press_releases/scale-computing-information-builders-partner-on-new-business-intelligence-and-analytics-appliance/

Scale and Information Builders have teamed up to make an appliance for Business Intelligence and Analytics to move this complicated and often difficult area of computing into the reach of small and, more often, medium businesses looking to harness this competitive advantage without investing heavily into the architectural design and implementation aspects of these systems. With Scale and Information Builders you get a customer built, designed and implemented appliance that allows you to get up and running with your BI and analytics needs as quickly as possible.

The product is called Scale Analytics and starts at less than $50,000 !

We know some of you HC3 users have direct experience with how HC3 has impacted IT costs in your organization. We'd love to hear some examples of how HC3 has made a difference in how you spend money, time, and resources in your own IT shops. What can you share?

As IT departments look to move beyond traditional virtualization into cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, they have a lot to consider. There are many types of organizations with different IT needs and it is important to determine whether those needs align more cloud or HCI. Before I dig into the differences, let me go over the similarities.

Both cloud and HCI tend to offer a similar user experience highlighted by ease of use and simplicity. One of the key features of both is simplifying the creation of VMs by automatically managing the pools of resources. With cloud, the infrastructure is all but transparent as the actual physical host where the VM is running is far removed from the user. With live migration capabilities and auto provisioning of resources, HCI can provide nearly the same experience.

As for storage, software defined storage pooling has made storage management practically as transparent in HCI as it is in cloud. In many ways, HCI is nearly a private cloud, but without the complexity of traditional underlying virtualization architecture, HCI makes infrastructure management turnkey and lets administrators focus on the workloads and applications, just like the cloud, but keeps everything on prem and not managed by a third party.

Still, there are definite differences between cloud and HCI so let’s get to those. I like to approach these with a series of questions to help guide between cloud and on prem HCI.

Is your business seasonal?

If your business is seasonal, the pay as you go Opex pricing model of cloud might make more sense as well as the bursting ability of cloud. If you need lots of computing power but only during short periods of the year, cloud might be best. If you business follows a more typical schedule of steady business throughout the year with some seasonal bumps, then an on prem Capex investment in HCI might be the best option.

Do you already have IT staff?

If you already have IT staff managing an existing infrastructure that you are looking to replace, an HCI solution will be both easy to implement and will allow your existing staff to change focus from infrastructure management to implementing better applications, services, and processes. If you are currently unstaffed for IT, cloud might be the way to go since you can get a number of cloud based application services for users with very little IT administration needed. You may need some resources to help make a variety of these services work together for your business, but it will likely be less than with an on prem solution.

Do you need to meet regulatory compliance on data?

If so, you are going to need to look into the implications of your data and services hosted and managed off site by a third party. You will be reliant on the cloud provider to provide the necessary security levels that meet compliance. With HCI, you have complete control and can implement any level of security because the solution is on prem.

Do you favor Capex or Opex?

Pretty simple here. Cloud is Opex. HCI can be Capex and is usually available for Opex as well through leasing options. The cloud Opex is going to be less predictable because many of the costs are based on dynamic usage, where the Opex with HCI should be completely predictable with a monthly leasing fee. considering further the Opex for HCI is usually in the form of lease-to-own so it drops off dramatically once the lease period ends as opposed to cloud Opex which is perpetual.

Can you rely on your internet connection?

Cloud is 100% dependent on internet connectivity so if your internet connection is down, all of your cloud computing is unavailable. The internet connection becomes a single point of failure for cloud. With HCI, internet connection will not affect local access to applications and services.

Do you trust third party services?

If something goes wrong with cloud, you are dependent on the cloud provider to correct the issue. What if your small or medium sized cloud provider suddenly goes out of business? Whatever happens, you are helpless, waiting, like an airline passenger waiting on the tarmac for a last minute repair. With HCI, the solution is under your control and you can take action to get systems back online.

Let me condense these into a little cheat sheet for you.

One last consideration that I don’t like to put into the question category is the ability to escape the cloud if it doesn’t work out. Why don’t I like to make it a question? Maybe I just haven’t found the right way to ask it without making cloud sound like some kind of death trap for your data, and I’m not trying to throw cloud under the bus here. Cloud is a good solution where it fits. That being said, it is still a valid consideration.

Most cloud providers have great onboarding services to get your data to the cloud more efficiently but they don’t have any equivalent to move you off. It is not in their best interest. Dragging all of your data back out of the cloud over your internet connection is not a project anyone would look forward to. If all of your critical data resides in the cloud, it might take a while to get it back on prem. With HCI it is already on prem so you can do whatever you like with it at local network speeds.

I hope that helps those who have been considering a choice between cloud and HCI for their IT infrastructure. Until next time.

You’ve probably heard a multitude of things around hyperconvergence or hyperconverged infrastructure as these are becoming hot new industry buzzwords, but what do these terms really mean? Are vendors that say they have hyperconverged infrastructure really living up to the promises of true hyperconvergence or is it just marketing hype?

The terms “hyperconvergence” and “hyperconverged infrastructure” originated in a meeting between Jeff Ready and Jason Collier of Scale Computing and Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. According to these three, the term was coined to mean the inclusion of a virtualization hypervisor into a complete infrastructure solution that included storage, compute, and virtualization. Some have thought that hyperconverged is synonymous with terms like ultraconverged or superconverged but that was not the intention.

If we hold this intended definition of hyperconvergence from its creators as the standard, what does it mean to be a real hyperconverged solution? Many solutions that call themselves hyperconverged rely on third party hypervisors such as VMware or Hyper-V for virtualization. The hypervisor software in that case is developed and licensed from a completely different vendor. That doesn’t seem to fit the definition of hyperconvergence at all.

Many vendors that use the hyperconverged label are merely peddling traditional virtualization architecture designed around traditional servers and SAN storage. This 3-2-1 architecture that built a platform for virtualization from a minimum of 3 servers, 2 switches, and 1 SAN appliance has been repackaged by some as a single vendor solution without any real convergence at all, and definitely no hypervisor. It is important to differentiate these traditional architectures from the next generation architectures that the term hyperconvergence was intended for.

Before hyperconvergence there was already a concept of converged infrastructure that combined server compute with storage as a single hardware platform onto which virtualization could be added. If a solution is not providing the hypervisor directly but relying on a third party hypervisor, it seems to fall back into the converged category, but not hyperconverged.

One of the key benefits of hyperconvergence is not having to rely on third party virtualization solutions, and being independent of the costs, complexity, and management of these third parties. The idea was no more hypervisor software licensing to pay for and one less vendor to deal with for support and maintenance. Hyperconvergence should be a complete virtualization and infrastructure solution from a single vendor. Maybe it is a marketing necessity for some vendor solutions to use a third party hypervisor to get to market due to funding. These solutions are not fulfilling the promise of true hyperconvergence for their customers.

Hypervisors have been around for long enough now that they are now a commodity. The idea of having to license and pay for a hypervisor as a separate entity should be giving IT solution purchasers pause as they look to implement new solutions. Cloud providers are not requiring customers to license hypervisors so why would so-called hyperconvergence vendors do this? We are hearing more and more from IT managers about their displeasure over the “Virtualization Tax” they’ve been paying for too long. The hype cycle for virtualization is over and users are ready to stop opening their checkbooks for an operating environment that should be included at no extra charge.

Adam Leibovici was known for his VDI cost calculator and now, without having time to maintain it himself, has released the tool to GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license so that it is open and free for the community to use and maintain. Thought that this would be a tool that MangoLassi readers would be interested in and find useful when evaluating or sizing or planning for VDI deployments.

I recently had the pleasure of working my first trade show with Scale Computing at the Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES) in Austin, TX. I’ve worked and attended many trade shows in the past but I was unsure of what to expect because A) new company and coworkers and B) MES has a boardroom format I hadn’t seen before. Let me give you a preview of my summary: It was amazing.

As a premiere sponsor of the event, we had the opportunity to present our solution to all 13 of the boardrooms at the show. MES is a show that Scale Computing has attended regularly for years because of our midmarket focus. As we went from boardroom to boardroom, wheeling our live, running HC3 cluster, we encountered a great mix of attendees from ardent fans and friends, familiar faces, and new faces.

If you’ve been following along with Scale Computing, you know we’ve had a big year in terms of product releases and partnerships. We’ve rolled out, among other things, hybrid storage with flash tiering, DRaaS, VDI with Workspot, and we were able to announce a new partnership at MES with Information Builders for Scale Analytics. We were fortunate enough to have Ty Wang from Workspot with us to promote our joint VDI solution.

As Jeff Ready, our founder and CEO, presented in each boardroom, it was clear that the managers of midmarket IT were understanding our message. There was a definite sense that, like us, our peers working in IT administration were seeing the need for simple infrastrastructure that delivered solutions like virtualization, VDI, DR, analytics, as an alternative to traditional virtualization and vendors like VMware.

In the evenings, when the attendees were able to visit our booth, it was encouraging to hear from so many IT directors and managers that they’re fed up with the problems that our HC3 solution was solving and that our prices that we displayed in our booth were exceeding their expectations. It is really a testament to our entire team that our product and message seemed to resonate so strongly.

I will also note that there was another vendor, whom I will not name, at the show who offers what they call a hyperconverged infrastructure solution. That vendor really brought their “A” game with a much higher level of sponsorship than Scale Computing. This being my first show, I expected us to be overshadowed by their efforts. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When the attendee voting was tallied at the awards ceremony, we walked away with three awards including Best of Show.

It was only one amazing trade show in the grand scheme of things, but it has really cemented in my mind that Scale Computing is changing IT for the midmarket with simplicity, scalability, and availability at the forefront of thought.

As IT departments look to move beyond traditional virtualization into cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms, they have a lot to consider. There are many types of organizations with different IT needs and it is important to determine whether those needs align more cloud or HCI. Before I dig into the differences, let me go over the similarities.

Both cloud and HCI tend to offer a similar user experience highlighted by ease of use and simplicity. One of the key features of both is simplifying the creation of VMs by automatically managing the pools of resources. With cloud, the infrastructure is all but transparent as the actual physical host where the VM is running is far removed from the user. With live migration capabilities and auto provisioning of resources, HCI can provide nearly the same experience.

As for storage, software defined storage pooling has made storage management practically as transparent in HCI as it is in cloud. In many ways, HCI is nearly a private cloud, but without the complexity of traditional underlying virtualization architecture, HCI makes infrastructure management turnkey and lets administrators focus on the workloads and applications, just like the cloud, but keeps everything on prem and not managed by a third party.

Still, there are definite differences between cloud and HCI so let’s get to those. I like to approach these with a series of questions to help guide between cloud and on prem HCI.

Is your business seasonal?

If your business is seasonal, the pay as you go Opex pricing model of cloud might make more sense as well as the bursting ability of cloud. If you need lots of computing power but only during short periods of the year, cloud might be best. If you business follows a more typical schedule of steady business throughout the year with some seasonal bumps, then an on prem Capex investment in HCI might be the best option.

Do you already have IT staff?

If you already have IT staff managing an existing infrastructure that you are looking to replace, an HCI solution will be both easy to implement and will allow your existing staff to change focus from infrastructure management to implementing better applications, services, and processes. If you are currently unstaffed for IT, cloud might be the way to go since you can get a number of cloud based application services for users with very little IT administration needed. You may need some resources to help make a variety of these services work together for your business, but it will likely be less than with an on prem solution.

Do you need to meet regulatory compliance on data?

If so, you are going to need to look into the implications of your data and services hosted and managed off site by a third party. You will be reliant on the cloud provider to provide the necessary security levels that meet compliance. With HCI, you have complete control and can implement any level of security because the solution is on prem.

Do you favor Capex or Opex?

Pretty simple here. Cloud is Opex. HCI can be Capex and is usually available for Opex as well through leasing options. The cloud Opex is going to be less predictable because many of the costs are based on dynamic usage, where the Opex with HCI should be completely predictable with a monthly leasing fee. considering further the Opex for HCI is usually in the form of lease-to-own so it drops off dramatically once the lease period ends as opposed to cloud Opex which is perpetual.

Can you rely on your internet connection?

Cloud is 100% dependent on internet connectivity so if your internet connection is down, all of your cloud computing is unavailable. The internet connection becomes a single point of failure for cloud. With HCI, internet connection will not affect local access to applications and services.

Do you trust third party services?

If something goes wrong with cloud, you are dependent on the cloud provider to correct the issue. What if your small or medium sized cloud provider suddenly goes out of business? Whatever happens, you are helpless, waiting, like an airline passenger waiting on the tarmac for a last minute repair. With HCI, the solution is under your control and you can take action to get systems back online.

Let me condense these into a little cheat sheet for you.

One last consideration that I don’t like to put into the question category is the ability to escape the cloud if it doesn’t work out. Why don’t I like to make it a question? Maybe I just haven’t found the right way to ask it without making cloud sound like some kind of death trap for your data, and I’m not trying to throw cloud under the bus here. Cloud is a good solution where it fits. That being said, it is still a valid consideration.

Most cloud providers have great onboarding services to get your data to the cloud more efficiently but they don’t have any equivalent to move you off. It is not in their best interest. Dragging all of your data back out of the cloud over your internet connection is not a project anyone would look forward to. If all of your critical data resides in the cloud, it might take a while to get it back on prem. With HCI it is already on prem so you can do whatever you like with it at local network speeds.

I hope that helps those who have been considering a choice between cloud and HCI for their IT infrastructure. Until next time.

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@aidan_walsh said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@aidan_walsh Nice, this is who we have in Rochester....

https://blackbuttondistilling.com/

I'm not usually one for flavoured spirits but that Apple Pie Monshine sounds great.

Oh no, it's disgusting. Moonshine is like a new bizarre fake term in the US for "utterly shit sprits". No one would put the label moonshine on a product if it was palatable. THat's for the hipster kids to think that they are drinking something illegal when, in fact, it's just overpriced garbage.

So true. The only real moonshine comes from a bootlegger up in the hills, in an unlabeled mason jar. I am very fortunate to be semi-connected to some rural moonshine aficionados, and what they bring over on holidays is the truth.

Same here, I drink actual moonshine and it is awesome. What is labeled that is stores is just a gimmick. Nothing like moonshine in taste OR in actuality.

Exactly. Real 'shine has a super clean flavor that is inimitable. And if you want to test the authenticity, pour a tiny bit in the jar lid and light it... should be a pure blue flame, anything else is bs.

I expect to see some at ML Con2!

You forget the first rule of moonshine club...

Probably a common problem in that club - many things become forgotten.

Very happy that we were able to attend, support and participate! Thanks so much for putting this together for everyone.

Definitely, thank you everyone who took the time to put this together!

Thinking outside the box. Paradigm shift. Innovation. As tired as these words and phrases are, they are ideas that we still strive to embody in technology development. But what happens when persons or companies actually embrace these ideas in principle and create solutions that don’t fit into the industry molds?

At Scale Computing, we challenged the traditional thinking on infrastructure design and architecture by putting forward a solution based on the idea that IT infrastructure should be so simple that anyone could manage it, with any level of experience. This idea goes against decades of IT managers being put through weeks of training and certification to manage servers, storage, and most recently, virtualization. Our idea is that infrastructure should not need multiple control panels filled with nerd knobs that must be monitored ad nauseam, but that the expertise of IT administrators should be focused on applications and business processes.

Our solution, the HC3 virtualization platform, targets midmarket customers because that is where the complexity of infrastructure architecture hits administrators the hardest. In the larger enterprise IT departments, there can be multiple teams dedicated to the different silos of infrastructure maintenance and management but in the midmarket there can be as little as one administrator in charge of infrastructure. Our founders are former IT administrators who understand the challenges and pains of managing infrastructure.

Very simply, we want to eliminate complexity from infrastructure in IT where it causes the most disruption. Complexity adds a number of costs including downtime due to failure, training and consulting fees for expertise, and extra labor costs for implementation, management, and maintenance. In order to maximize the benefit of simplicity for our target market, we specifically designed our solution without the extra complexity required by larger enterprise organizations. The result is a simple hardware and virtualization platform that can be implemented with running VMs in under an hour, is fully redundant and resilient against hardware failures, virtually eliminates both planned and unplanned downtime, and can be scaled out quickly and easily. Basically, you get a nearly turnkey infrastructure that you rarely have to manage.

This whole idea seems very straightforward to us here at Scale Computing and our customers certainly seem to get it. As for the rest of the industry, including the analysts, our focus on the midmarket seems to be viewed as a liability. We purposefully do not have all of the features and complexity of solutions that target the larger enterprise customers. The HC3 platform does not scale out to the same level as other solutions that target the larger enterprise. We do not support VMware with the specific goal of not burdening our customers with third party hypervisor licensing. We include the hypervisor at no additional charge.

We are different for a reason, but to the analysts those differences do not line up with the checklists they have developed over the years of looking at enterprise solutions. The simplicity of the HC3 does not equate with analysts as visionary and forward thinking because of their enterprise focus when it comes to IT infrastructure. We’ll probably never find favor with analyst reviews unless we sell into a Fortune 500 customer, and that just isn’t on our horizon. Instead we’ll keep focusing on the solution we provide for the midmarket to simplify infrastructure, disaster recovery, VDI, and distributed enterprise.

Are we an underdog in our market? Maybe. But you could probably say the same about the companies we target with our solutions. They aren’t the industry giants, but rather the smaller guys who are driving local economic growth, who are nimble and innovative like we are, and who appreciate the value of a solution that actually solves the real problems that have plagued IT departments for decades. It’s not easy being different but no one said starting an IT revolution would be easy.