Recent ransomware attacks called WannaCry and Petya have been making headlines. They are demonstrating just how vulnerable many computer systems are to attack. Tens of thousands of systems have been affected by these ransomware attacks and they should be making you consider how vulnerable your systems are.

The type of ransomware attack used by WannaCry and Petya encrypt data, making it unreadable, and then demand payment to decrypt the data. They both attacked a vulnerability exposed in Windows operating systems that were not updated to a sufficiently recent patch level. While your systems may not have these specific vulnerabilities, it is impossible to prepare for every new or existing vulnerability that may be the target of the next attack. In addition to making your systems less vulnerable to attack, it’s a pretty good idea to have a plan for how to deal with a successful attack on your systems.

Who is most vulnerable?
In this particular case, Windows users. Windows servers and more importantly Windows Hyper-V servers were vulnerable. A Hyper-V server being hit by ransomware can cripple a small business and do serious damage to larger businesses. Small businesses really take the brunt of these attacks because even one server or one virtual host can represent nearly the entire business IT infrastructure.

What are the options?
Worst Case: Total Data Loss

You lose your data and start over. If you didn’t have a good backup or no backup at all, you may have just lost your data. No one wants to be in this situation. It could literally be the end of a business trying to recover from this type of total loss.

Recover from Backup

You may have a good backup of your data and you can recover it. Great. When was the backup taken? Last night? What is the cost of the lost data since then? How long does it take to recover onto a clean system? What is the cost of the lost productivity while recovering? These costs can be high.

Recover from a VM Snapshot

If the machine that was affected was a virtual machine running Windows, you may have been taking regularly scheduled snapshots of the VM and you can revert to a snapshot of the entire VM from before the ransomware infected the system. The recovery time here is very short and the amount of data loss depends on how often you are taking snapshots. This is probably the best case scenario, unless the hypervisor was Hyper-V and it also got hit by the ransomware. Then you are in bad shape.

Pay the Ransom?

For Petya, which demanded $300 in bitcoin, a few actually paid the ransom before the contact email was shut down, closing off that option for the rest of the victims. Even those who do pay have no guarantee of getting their data back according to Forbes.com. Even if you were guaranteed to get your data back, it is not a good option, no matter how much economic sense it makes, because it rewards the perpetrators.

What can you do?
If you are a small business, you might be using Hyper-V because it is a popular choice for virtualization at a low cost. You might also not have the budget to employ a full-time IT staffer to make sure your systems are up to date against the latest threats. Still, being prepared for attacks like ransomware may be easier and more cost-effective than you might think.

Consider HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure from Scale Computing. Our virtualization platform combines server and storage hardware with virtualization into an easy-to-use appliance. With HC3, you can rest more easily knowing that with our snapshot technology and other security features, you can easily restore VMs from ransomware and other virus attacks quickly and easily.

HC3 is not out of your budget. Our appliances are comparable in price to traditional server hardware and you can start with just a single appliance if that is all you need. Our solution is cheaper than traditional virtualization architectures that require external storage like SAN or NAS and are easier to deploy and manage. If you are concerned about how these ransomware attacks and other security threats seem to becoming a way of life, check out what HC3 can do to help protect your business.

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/wannacry-petya-whats-next-are-you-at-risk/

Pretty high level overview, but a brief insight into what managers are being told in the media about hyperconvergence.

Nothing specific to Scale here, but interesting info on the hyperconverged world as it sits in the first half of 2017. Of particular note is the measurement that 40% of all companies are now on hyperconvergence and Dell EMC has now overtaken Nutanix as the large player in the HCI market.

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-hyper-convergence-is-changing-the-shape-of-IT

The UAE is a modern emerged market with a lot of technology and a lot of IT people and is seeing extremely high hyperconverged adoption rates, well above 60%! This is very encouraging for the market in general and the UAE tends to be a bit of a bellweather as to where other economies will be heading. The UAE is often in a position to invest more aggressively than in other markets and is small enough for peer interactions to be pervasive.

There are many new toilet and bidet combinations today. It's like... hyperconverged.

Workspot and Scale have an interview video with Mike O'Neil, the Director of IT with Hydradyne

https://vimeo.com/190567760

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/poster-display/

“For IT departments in our market, HC3 could dominate. Scale is offering a product [HC3] that will stabilize and add insurance to their IT infrastructure and can grow as quickly, or as slowly, as their business grows.” - John Venter, IT Manager

Manufacturing Success Story: Poster Display

FAST FACTS:

For more than 70 years, Poster Display Company has been driven by a single, overriding business philosophy: to use state of the art printing technology, company-wide innovation and human ingenuity to help its customers achieve increased sales through superior graphic solutions. With several diverse printers in their environment, the company relies heavily on a stable IT infrastructure to successfully deliver high quality, best-in-class graphics to each customer.

INTRODUCTION:

Prior to virtualizing, the IT environment of the Poster Display Company consisted of a handful of Microsoft Windows-based servers all with direct attached storage. The proposal to virtualize their infrastructure had been made a year prior, but the company struggled to justify the investment given the fact that their infrastructure, while extended well beyond the end of its useful life, was still operating effectively.

CHALLENGE:

John Venter, IT Manager at Poster Display Company, recalls asking himself the hypothetical question, “What if they fail?” (referring to the servers originally purchased in 2004). The hypothetical event then turned into reality when the motherboard in a critical server running an SQL database failed. “We were barely able to rebuild it. Had we lost all of that data, I would hate to think where we would be right now,” said Venter.

“The problem with all of the solutions was the price when you coupled it with VMware,” said Venter. “The initial purchase combined with the ongoing management costs were prohibitive given our limited IT budget and resources.”

“We needed a solution that could provide insurance against failure in order for our business to continue running effectively,” he continued.

After the critical failure, it was much easier to justify investment in a highly available infrastructure, so the company set out to revisit the earlier proposal of two servers, a Dell SAN and VMware licensing. While this alternative met the requirement for high availability, the costs were still prohibitive. “The cost [of the VMware solution] was even higher with support factored in,” said Venter.

SOLUTION:

Poster Display Company was then introduced to Scale Computing’s HC3 – a ‘datacenter-in-a-box’ – integrating servers, storage, and virtualization into a single, highly available, easy-to-use and scalable system. In his initial review, Venter was impressed with the product’s ability to scale to the needs of his IT department at an affordable price. “You can buy what you need now and then easily add on later. It [HC3] helped us eliminate the concern that something won’t be able to grow with us as our business continues to grow,” said Venter.

With no virtualization software to license, no external storage to buy and the hypervisor already integrated in the system, HC3radically simplifies the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 makes the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server. “Going to a single dashboard to monitor the environment is something that is going to be very appealing in our market,” said Venter.

When evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO), small and midsized businesses implementing virtualization are able to realize greater cost savings when implementing HC3 compared to other solutions. “When you multiply out the years, the VMware option kept diverging from Scale over time,” said Venter.

Starting at under $25,500 for a 3-node cluster, HC3 is ideal for first-time virtualizers and those that have avoided virtualizing due to the costs and complexities of the implementation and management. “For IT departments in our market, HC3 could dominate. Scale is offering a product [HC3] that will stabilize and add insurance to their IT infrastructure and can grow as quickly or as slowly as their business grows,” he concluded.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/cascade-lumber-company/

"Scale HC3 is a perfect fit. HC3 simplifies server and storage virtualization and management. This gives technology directors time to focus on what's really important." -
Joel Althoff, Cascade Lumber

Manufacturing Success Story: Cascade Lumber and Manufacturing

FAST FACTS:

Cascade Lumber and Manufacturing is a manufacturer of wood and cold-formed steel wall components serving residential, commercial and agricultural markets in the Midwest. With two production sites, the majority of IT is administered remotely by a staff of one, requiring an infrastructure that is highly available and easily supported. Cascade prides itself on its use of computer technology throughout the estimating, design and manufacturing processes the backbone, of which is a solid IT infrastructure.

INTRODUCTION:

Cascade Lumber and Manufacturing fully understood the benefits of virtualization when they initially deployed Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition, but had underestimated the complexity in both setup and maintenance of such a deployment. The environment necessitated a number of host servers with complex iSCSI initiators, server clusters and policies to be configured and managed. Cascade also had to deploy shared storage (SAN) with iSCSI targets and LUNs, multi-pathing and storage security to manage.

CHALLENGE:

While this infrastructure accomplished the reliability and high availability needed in Cascade’s environment, the cost and complexity of growing and maintaining the environment was prohibitive. “Trying to grow the capabilities of the infrastructure caused several headaches,” said Joel Althoff, IT Manager, Cascade Lumber and Manufacturing. “We needed the ability to grow without getting killed on the expense.” Growing the system meant adding storage capacity and computing host servers, as well as purchasing additional licenses of their hypervisor. Cascade needed to consolidate their IT infrastructure with a scalable and cost effective solution that was easy to manage.

SOLUTION:

Cascade came across Scale Computing’s HC3 – a hyperconvered solution that combines servers, storage, and virtualization into a product that delivers virtualized infrastructure-as-an-appliance. HC3 eliminates the need to purchase virtualization software, external servers and shared storage, resulting in significant reductions to cost and complexity.

According to Althoff, “We felt HC3 was the simplest, most reliable and most cost-effective way of deploying our infrastructure. We have moved from three separate pieces to manage, down to just one and I can manage it from anywhere that has a web browser.”

As a scale-out solution, additional compute or storage resources can be added to a cluster within minutes, with applications and data failing over between nodes in the event of equipment failure.This convergence has also resulted in significant timesavings in managing Cascade’s infrastructure. “I would estimate around 20 percent savings in management time over what we had with our XenServer deployment,” said Althoff.

HC3 was built with the availability of a virtualized server and SAN, the scalability of a clustered infrastructure and the simplicity of a single server. By deploying HC3, Cascade was able to realize the benefits of a fully virtualized environment without the complexity that existed in their prior virtualization deployment – all at a fraction of the cost of their prior solution.

“Most small businesses that I know are afraid of virtualization. They are scared of SANs and the complexity that it brings. HC3 enables small to medium-sized business to jump into virtualization without all of the pitfalls and confusion,” says Althoff.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/midwest-acoust-a-fiber/

“Going the other route, it would have likely taken triple that amount of time and a lot more in terms of configuration.” -Daniel Penrod, Manager Systems Administrator

Manufacturing Success Story: Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber

FAST FACTS:

Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber is a leading manufacturer of fiber-engineered composites, including sound and heat shields for the automotive industry. As a tier one supplier to General Motors and DaimlerChrysler and a tier two supplier to the Ford Motor Company, maintaining uptime and reliability in the IT infrastructure with limited resources is vital to the success of the company

INTRODUCTION:

Faced with aging servers that had a propensity for failure, Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber was on the search for a turnkey virtualization solution that would improve the uptime and reliability in their IT infrastructure. At the same time, limited IT resources required that the solution be both easy to use and affordable.

“Saving money was a primary driver for us,” said Daniel Penrod, Manager Systems Administrator

CHALLENGE:

Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber received several competing quotes, including HP and Dell, for piecemeal solutions that would require significant effort to setup and manage. In addition to servers, Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber would need to purchase a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) for shared storage, as well as license VMware to act as the hypervisor.

“The problem with all of the solutions was the price when you coupled it with VMware,” said Penrod. “The initial purchase combined with the ongoing management costs were prohibitive given our limited IT budget and resources.”

SOLUTION:

Penrod eventually found an alternative solution in Scale Computing’s HC3. HC3 was built with the availability of a virtualized server and SAN, the scalability of a clustered infrastructure and the simplicity of a single server. By deploying HC3 , Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber was able to realize the benefits of a fully virtualized environment without the added complexity of a typical virtualization deployment – all at a fraction of the costs of other alternatives

“The other solutions were as much as double the cost,” said Penrod.

HC3 does not require storage protocols, networking or provisioning. On the storage side, there are no RAID sets, iSCSI targets or LUNs, multi-pathing, storage security, zoning or fabric for Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber to setup or manage. On the server side, they will never have to deal with the complexity of iSCSI initiators, host and VM file systems, server clusters and policies.

“In a small shop, you have to keep it simple. The more complexity that can be hidden from the administrator, the better,” said Penrod.

To create a new virtual machine, Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber simply assigns the resources necessary for the VM and loads the operating system. Using HC3, Penrod was able to save hours of unnecessary overhead in the deployment of new VMs.

“Going the other route, it would have likely taken triple that amount of time and a lot more in terms of configuration,” said Penrod.

The time savings seen from deploying HC3 has enabled the IT department at Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber to take on other much needed projects including the upgrade of Windows 2000 Servers to a newer version.

“I can now rebuild them in a side-by-side [virtualized] environment with little risk to the business,” said Penrod.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/penlon/

"With Scale we have effectively been able to build a data centre in a server room, without cloud based services. The technology provides servers, storage and virtualisation in one solution with complete transparency." - Tony Serratore, IT Manager

Medical Manufacturing Success Story: Penlon

Key Challenges

• Existing solution was difficult and complex to manage
• Inability to easily migrate data
• The legacy solution was outdated and updates were proving difficult
• No ability to scale out
• Concerns over the reliability of business continuity

Scale Computing Solution

Penlon selected Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster, to support over 40 virtual machines.

Business Benefits

• No licensing costs
• Improved data centre capabilities
• Dramatically reduced time management
• Added ability to scale out the IT infrastructure and plan IT budgets
• Reduction in RPO and RTO
• Complete business continuity for the IT environment

Penlon is a leading medical device manufacturing company, based in Abingdon. Established in 1943, the company has a long-standing reputation for quality and service within the medical industry for manufacturing and distributing products and systems for anesthesia, intubation, oxygen therapy and suction. Penlon operates internationally, with a presence in over 90 countries, spanning across Europe, North America, Middle East and Asia.

As a traditional medical manufacturing company, Penlon constantly reviews its product design, manufacturing processes and IT systems. As part of this Penlon looked to review its IT systems in order to deliver on two main objectives; simplified management and business continuity.

Having previously moved to virtualisation in order to save time and to create a more streamlined and enhanced IT environment, Penlon wanted to simplify the management and complexity of its infrastructure whilst guaranteeing business continuity for its customers.

IT Challenges

Penlon had been previously relying on a traditional VMware environment, but over time it was proving too complex and difficult to manage. In particular, the complexity of the system meant that Penlon struggled to migrate data and install updates. Without regular updates the company was left vulnerable to downtime and costly outages, as there was no way to ensure they had the most up to date environment. Tony Serratore, IT Manager, at Penlon commented, “The systems were vastly difficult to manage and when it came to updates we had to ensure everything was in sync. If the system seemed to be working we would not even think about installing upgrades as it was too complex and came with risks. But this wasn’t a long term solution.”

Not only was the existing VMware environment difficult to update, but the system was high maintenance. The IT team would have to allocate resources to ensure its smooth running, costing them both time and money. “The choice was to either stay with our current system running the risk of downtime or we could look for a new solution that was simple, cost effective, and easy to use,” explained Serratore.
Identifying the key requirements

Of paramount importance, not just to the IT team but to the company, was the need to guarantee continuity. Penlon also wanted the added ability to scale, adding capacity as and when needed. Serratore commented, “As an international company Penlon is constantly looking to expand its business. However, planning budgets for IT infrastructure ahead can be difficult. We wanted a solution which would work with us and support our growing business, offering the flexibility and agility we needed.”

Proving the concept

After evaluating the market and considering a number of other vendors such as Simplivity, Penlon opted for the Scale Solution. The company was introduced to Scale Computing through reseller NAS UK and opted for a two week Proof of Concept (POC) of the Scale Computing hyperconverged HC3 cluster. Serratore explained, “After registering our interest, we received a POC product within two days. Not only were we impressed with the technology but we felt Scale Computing would value us as a customer if we made that investment.”

After running a successful POC, Penlon opted for the HC 4000 and HC 1000 cluster, which offered disaster recovery, high availability, cloning, replication and snapshots providing complete business continuity.

Enjoying scalability, simplified management and business continuity

The HC3 clusters dramatically reduced management time, allowing the IT department to focus on other challenges rather than IT infrastructure. In addition, the technology offered scale-out architecture providing Penlon the room to expand. Serratore noted, “The Scale solution fits perfectly with our IT roadmap as we can add capacity as and when needed. We don’t need to over provision and can simply expand our environment when needed. With Scale we can align IT strategy with business growth.”

“After implementing Scale, we reduced our management time by hours. Previously we would have spent time managing our VMware environment but the Scale solution is so easy to use we have been able to dramatically reduce management time,” continued Serratore. “Our RPO and RTO dramatically reduced from three days to a matter of minutes. We can now use this time to focus on other IT priorities making a real difference to the business.”

“With Scale we have effectively been able to build a data centre in a server room, without cloud based services. The technology provides servers, storage and virtualisation in one solution with complete transparency,” concluded Serratore.

Youtube Video

Manufacturing is at the heart of any economy. The industrial revolution continues to roll forward with continued innovation and automation. The role of IT in manufacturing is increasing in every aspect of manufacturing from design to shipping. Manufacturers require reliable, powerful IT infrastructure systems to implement and maintain efficient manufacturing operations.

Scale Computing’s HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure solution is ideal for manufacturing companies that need powerful IT infrastructure without complexity. Complexity equals cost in IT and the added cost of complexity from traditional IT solutions drives up manufacturing costs. HC3 makes IT infrastructure simple, scalable, highly available, and affordable. In order for manufacturers to remain competitive in modern global markets, they need modern IT infrastructure solutions like HC3.

KIB Electronics is just one manufacturer that has chosen HC3 for IT infrastructure.

Whether it is industry specific applications like ERP and CAD, or general IT applications like messaging, finance, CRM, and office tools, HC3 is a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use platform that supports them all. HC3 is modern infrastructure for modern manufacturing.

Scale is happy to announce the general availability of our HyperCore 7.2 firmware for the HC3 hyperconverged platform.

This is a rolling upgrade, meaning it is non-disruptive to running VMs. HyperCore versions 7.1.11 and above have a direct upgrade path to version 7.2.16. See the 7.2 Release Notes available in the Customer and Partner Portals for additional upgrade paths.

New features include:

• Windows 10/2016 Support
  • Allows for users to install and operate Windows 10 and Server 2016 on the HC3 system
• Virtual Disk Expansion on Clone
  • When cloning a VM users will have the option to expand the size of the virtual disks and apply the expanded disk capacity to the cloned VM
• Updated Scale Tools
  • Included is an updated Scale Tools ISO file
    • Scale-virtio-win-0.1.126.sc00.iso
      • New virtIO (performance) storage and network drivers with an easy-to-use Windows installer wizard
      • Newly included is a lightweight agent for application consistent VM-level snapshots
• New Bulk Actions
  • Added the ability to manually Snapshot, Clone, and Delete for a group of VMs
    • You can select VMs by choosing the VM’s name or applied tags
• Other Enhancements/Bug Fixes
  • High memory utilization no longer causes VM live migrations to take exceedingly long
  • Max console resolution for Windows 2012/R2 and above is no longer maxed at 1024x768
  • When using more than 90% of the storage capacity the system will automatically prevent new clones, snapshots, and VMs
  • A warning will be issued via email and displayed in the UI
  • Fixed an issue where clocksource failure could cause invalid virtual disk (VSD) lease expiration
  • The background disk scrubber now remedies latent errors that previously could cause issues

It's three letter acronym bingo! The Disaster Recovery Journal mentioned that with hyperconvergence now in the $25K entry point is perfect for the SMB and is making big inroads. Of course, we at @scale are a bit surprised by this given that we have been offering HCI under $25K for many years, most of the history of the HCI industry, in fact. So not sure why DRJ thinks that now it makes sense for the SMB, it's really made sense for it from day one. But at least some outlets are starting to pick up on what the IT industry has known all along.

CRN takes a look at who the big names are in the hyperconvergence space in the first quarter of 2017 in a short slideshow of the who's who of the top players. Of course, Scale makes the list.

Information Age just had a great interview with Scale's founder and CEO Jeff Ready on the "Industry Perspective on the Evolution of Storage."

Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing - the only remaining privately held and independent hyperconvergence storage company - discusses hyperconvergence infrastructure and the evolving storage industry with Information Age

Jeff talks a little about the history of the company, the market and where things are going in the future.

Sadly, no mention of Scale in this article, but CIOReview has a brief discussion on convergence and the move to hyperconvergence in their latest article on Simplifying Virtualization. They talk a little about the goals and how it is sometimes believed to have been derived from converged infrastructure.

A very high level overview, to be sure, and not very technical and might decide to do some defining of their own. But I think that it helps to give a good overview of the space.

This past weekend I replaced my over-the-range microwave oven. While the process of replacing it was pretty unremarkable, it was the process that led me to replace it and the result that were interesting. It got me thinking about the process by which IT groups ultimately choose to refresh infrastructure and solutions.

Let me explain what happened with my old microwave oven.

Event #1 – About 3 years ago or so, the front handle of the microwave broke off. I’m not sure how it happened, my sister and two of my nieces were living with me at the time, but it broke off pretty completely. No big deal. It was not hard to grab the door from underneath and open it and push it closed. It was a minor inconvenience. I wasn’t interested in replacing it.

Event #2 – Around 6 months to a year after the handle broke, the sensor or mechanism on the door that determined whether the door was closed started failing intermittently. When you closed the door, the microwave might or might not start. You might have to open and shut the door multiple times before it started. Annoying. Did the broken door handle and the way we were now opening the door contribute to this fault? Unknown. It was annoying but the microwave still worked. Another level of inconvenience but I was willing to live with it.

Event #3 – Add 6 more months and the carousel failed. It started failing on and off but finally failed completely. Again, the microwave still “worked” in that it emitted microwaves and heated food but now the food needed to be rotated every 15 seconds or so to prevent hotspots. Of course, the fact that I had to open and close the door to rotate the food only made the problem of the failing door sensor more acute. It was becoming pretty inconvenient to use. But it still worked.

That should have been the last straw, right? Nope. Of course, I thought about replacing it. It was somewhere on my to-do list, but by then I had been slowly acclimating myself to the inconvenience and finding workarounds. Workarounds included things like using the conventional oven more and eating out more often. More leftovers were left to spoil in the fridge. I was modifying my behavior to adjust to the inadequacies of the microwave.

Event #4 – My sister and nieces had moved out a year ago or so, and now my girlfriend had moved in. She didn’t demand I replace the microwave or anything. There was no nagging. There was no pressure. But I wanted to replace it because I wanted her to have a reliable microwave oven. So, I finally replaced it.

My old microwave, “Old Unreliable,” pictured above, was a Frigidaire microwave. I am not knocking Frigidaire in any way. It served me well for many years before this journey to replacement. I have many other Frigidaire appliances I’m still using today.

Why did I wait so long? It was not terribly expensive to replace nor difficult. With “Old Unreliable”, I was costing myself time and money by letting good leftovers go to waste and being predisposed to eating at restaurants because I was inconvenienced by the microwave. I haven’t tried to calculate it but I am sure I racked up restaurant bills over the course of avoiding the old microwave that exceeded the cost of the new microwave, by a lot. All those tasty leftovers gone to waste…

I believe this overall scenario happens pretty regularly in IT. Admins and users have to deal with solutions that are inconvenient to use, prone to failure, and that incur secondary costs in excess management and maintenance.

IT Admins are expected to be able to engineer some workarounds when needed, but the more workarounds needed, the more expertise and knowledge needed, which can become costly. Consider also that constantly working around clunky implementations does not usually lead to efficient productivity or innovation. As with my microwave journey, there is a point where it starts costing more to keep the existing solution rather than investing in a new solution. Those costs are sometimes subtle and grow over time, and like a frog in a pot of water, we don’t always notice when things are heating up.

How much could be gained in productivity, cost saving, and user satisfaction by investing in a new solution? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” can only take you so far, and does not foster innovation and growth. Rather than becoming comfortable with an inadequate solution and workarounds, consider what improvements could be made with newer technology.

The Price Is Right is of the longest running game show on television and one of the most beloved. I grew up watching it hosted by Bob Barker and it is still going today, hosted by Drew Carey. The show features a variety of challenges for players but most of them involve guessing at the retail price of various products ranging from groceries all the way up to vehicles and vacation packages. The concept of guessing at prices reminded me of shopping for IT solutions.

I’m sure most of you know what I am talking about. You start researching various hardware and software solutions but you quickly find that the price is not readily available. You have to contact the vendor for pricing. Why? Often they can’t even give you a ballpark estimate. Why? The answer is simple, but awful. They want to charge you the highest price possible and the only way to do that is withhold pricing until they have sufficiently worked you over with a double whammy of sales and marketing.

IT is a cost center. We all accept this. Organizations don’t want to spend any more on IT than is necessary, but it is necessary, at least to a point. These vendors want to artificially build up that need for more and more before they hit you with a price because they want you to spend more.

Personally, I hate this practice of withholding pricing. I want to have an idea of what a solution costs up front when I am researching. I don’t need a sales guy smooth talking me to soften the blow of the price. I’m an adult. I know how money works. This practice is all too common in IT solution sales. That’s why I love Scale Computing. We are different.

Did you see what I did there? Pricing for our HC3 systems. Not all the pricing. We have a lot of configuration options and it would be a feat of engineering to try to show everything. Base pricing to give you a starting point. Pricing that includes 1 year of maintenance and support. Why are we different? Well, we just think our pricing is fair to begin with. We don’t want you to have to guess. Don’t guess. Those are per node prices and we gave you a couple examples to get you started. We just want you to get a great solution at a great price.

Can you afford it? We will work with you to get you exact pricing on the configuration you need and nothing more. We can do an assessment of what you need and show you some of the costs of integration, management, maintenance, and support that come with or without our HC3 solution. If the numbers don’t add up, that’s fine. We won’t sell you a solution that you can’t afford, don’t want, or won’t work for you. We think you will want it and probably can afford it. In fact, you might find out that you can’t afford NOT to have it.

By the way, that pricing is available in our HC3 Sales Brochure right on our website. For more information on some of the tertiary costs of IT ownership, check out this white paper, “How HC3 Lowers the Total Cost of Infrastructure”.

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.

City governments face unique unique IT challenges, supporting a number of departments ranging from emergency services to parks and recreation. With limited budgets, these organizations look at technology to reduce the costs of the services they provide. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a great fit for city governments because it not only can be implemented at a low cost, but the cost savings continues through reduced operational and management costs.

But don’t just take it from us. These three videos let our customers speak for themselves about HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure.

Youtube Video

HC3 is a great choice for any IT organization looking to modernize for simplicity, scalability, availability, and disaster recovery. Our customer’s success is our success at Scale Computing. We want to help you be successful too. Let us know how we can help.