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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.

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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.

The DataCenterJournal's article on Next Gen HCI looks at where hyperconvergence is going in the future and specifically looks at how and why networking may be important in the future to be brought into the HCI fold.

More in our HCI roundup: TGDaily has an article on HCI and True Hyperconvergence and how these will lead to improved infrastructure. TGD introduces some of their own definitions, but has some discussion around the value of different convergence approaches.

Big day in HC articles, so providing a round up...

CIO Review has a short article on The Need for HCI in Today's Business Environment which mainly talks about the benefits in scaling, flexibility and agility. All great reasons to consider HCI.

HUGE news! You can supercharge your HC3 cluster with a flash storage retrofit! We're hosting a webinar on April 19th at 3:00 PM (EDT) specifically to tell you all about it. In this webinar we will talk about the HC3 Flash Retrofit Service to drastically improve storage I/O. Don't miss the opportunity to learn more about HC3 flash retrofit so you can schedule your retrofit before it is gone.

Register to learn more.

In today’s markets, businesses need IT solutions to stay competitive and reach customers to drive sales and revenue. New technologies are constantly being developed to help businesses achieve greater efficiency and lower costs.

Despite the availability of these technology innovations, many businesses lag behind the technology curve, continuing to use older, more inefficient solutions. Some smaller businesses simply may not be aware of the latest technology solutions, but for most, there are other more sinister flaws in decision making that prevent IT innovation.

Here are 3 reasons that businesses hold themselves back from innovating in IT.

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1 . The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Rather than try to explain the sunk cost fallacy completely, I’ll instead just ask you to Google “sunk cost fallacy” and read one of the many in depth descriptions you will find, if you are not already familiar with it. To summarize it briefly, it is the idea that if you have made a significant investment in a solution, you must continue using that solution because of the investment. It is basically using the rear window when you are trying to drive business forward. That investment is history.

Everyone wants to get the most out of investment but in the technology game, newer better solutions come along all the time. Making the decision to hold onto a solution when there is a better solution available may well end up being a bigger cost than having switched. For example, you might invest in a storage solution that you plan and budget to use for the next 4 years. After 2 years, you may have both a need and opportunity to go to a better solution but you might delay because of the sunk costs of the “4 year” investment.

2. The Rotating Budget Cycle

This is related to the sunk cost fallacy but is more related to adhering to a certain budgeting schedule. IT assets can be expensive and sometimes replacing them gets budgeted on a cycle and the cycles for different types of assets do not align.

For example, you may have purchased some server assets one year, the next year you purchased a storage solutions, and the next year you purchased some software solutions. You create a budget cycle where you are only purchasing part of the overall solution per year. This way of planning may help adhere to steady annual budget that is easier to account for and then you begin repeating this on a 3 year cycle.

But what if one year when you were supposed to buy servers, you want to buy a combined solution that includes both servers and storage? Are you able to adjust the budget to accommodate for the extra spending in that year or have you locked yourself out of that prospect and you instead have to wait until the following year because that is when the storage budget is available.

3. The Brand Name Game

When making any purchase, it is good to know something about the vendor, especially when there is support and warranty involved. It’s good to make sure the vendor is not a sham or a business that will be shuttering in a year or two. But is a brand name a safety net in this case?

The technology industry is known for innovation arising from little know startups as much or even more than from established brands. While small startups may fail or are at risk of being sucked into an abyss through acquisition, it is also not uncommon for large brand name products to be discontinued or brand name vendors to be acquired. Where brand name means a certain level of consistency and longevity in other markets, it is much less the case in technology solutions. By shopping only brand names, IT organizations are putting about as much though into buying IT technology as they would buying a hair dryer.

Smaller vendors with lesser known brands can be more of an asset than a liability in IT solutions because they may offer more personalized services, more responsive support, and more innovative solutions. With older, larger, more recognized vendors, you may be treated as just one of tens of thousands of customers who are shuffled through the support and service queues. The small startup that was passed over because of the lack of brand recognition often becomes the next big brand that replaces the solution you went with.

Summary

When it comes to technology innovation, it is important to stay open to new and emerging technologies to solve your immediate challenges. I know some IT professionals have their headphones on listening to “The Way We’ve Always Done It” by Zero Innovation, but many others are starting to get it. Continuing to use less efficient solutions may not only be slowing you down, it may be costing you more in the long run.

http://blog.scalecomputing.com/3-reasons-businesses-fail-to-innovate-in-it/

ChannelBiz UK has an article on our push with CMS to increase our presence in the UK and Irish markets. For anyone in the region interested in Scale products, hopefully this is welcome news. More presence, more opportunities! Let us know how we can help you guys in the isles!

Scale Computing makes HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure appliances and clusters for IT organizations around the world with a focus on simplicity, scalability, and availability. But HC3 IT infrastructure solution might not be for you for a few reasons.

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You want to be indispensable for your proprietary knowledge.
You want to be the only person who truly understands your IT Infrastructure. Having designed your infrastructure personally and managing it with your own home-grown scripts, only you have the knowledge and expertise to keep it running. Without you, your IT department is doomed to fail.

HC3 is probably not for you. HC3 was designed to be so simple to use that it can be managed by even a novice IT administrator. HC3 would not allow you to control the infrastructure with proprietary design and secret knowledge that only you could possess. Of course, if you did go with HC3, you’d be a pioneer of new technology who would be an ideal asset for any forward thinking IT department.

You are defined by your aging certifications.
You worked hard and paid good money to get certifications in storage systems, virtualization hypervisors, server hardware, and even disaster recovery systems that are still around. You continue to use these same old technologies because you are certified in them, and that gives you leverage for higher salary. Newer technologies hold less interest because they wouldn’t allow you to take advantage of your existing certifications.

HC3 is probably not for you. HC3 is based on new infrastructure architecture that doesn’t require any expensive certifications. Any IT administrator can use HC3 because it was designed to remove reliance on legacy technologies that were too complex and required excessive expertise. HC3 won’t allow you to leverage your certifications in these legacy technologies. Of course, with all of the management time you’d save using HC3, you’d be able to learn new technologies and expand your skills beyond infrastructure.

You like going to VMworld every year.
You’ve been using VMware and going to VMworld since 2006 and it is a highlight of your year. You always enjoy reuniting with VMworld regulars and getting out of the office. It isn’t as useful as it was earlier on but you still attend a few sessions along with all of the awesome parties. Life just wouldn’t be the same without attending VMworld.

HC3 is probably not for you. HC3 uses a built-in hypervisor, alleviating the need for VMware software and VMware software licensing. Without VMware, you probably won’t be able to justify your trip to VMworld as a business expense. Of course, with all the money you will likely save going with HC3, your budget might be open to going to even more conferences to help you develop new skills and services to help your business grow even faster.

You prefer working late nights and weekends.
The office and better yet, the data center, are a safe place for you. Whether you don’t have the best home life or you prefer to avoid awkward social events, you find that working late nights and weekends doing system updates and maintenance a welcome prospect. We get it. Real life can be hard. Solitude along with the humming of fans and spinning disks offers an escape from the real world.

HC3 is probably not for you. HC3 is built to eliminate the need to take systems offline for updates and maintenance tasks so these can be done at any time, including during normal business hours. HC3 doesn’t leave many infrastructure tasks that need to be done late at night or on weekends. Of course, if you did go with HC3, you’d probably have more time to and energy to sort out your personal life and make your home and your social life more to your liking.

Original post: http://blog.scalecomputing.com/why-hc3-it-infrastructure-might-not-be-for-you/

Wanted to share an article from MarketWire this week on Scale Computing's HC3 Hits the Right Note for Canadian Musical Instrument Retailer Chain

"Rather than having to buy separate servers and storage, virtualization software and management tools, and then having to network all these components together to achieve a highly available infrastructure, organizations can instead deploy a single clustered HC3 hyperconverged platform to achieve the same results with greater benefits," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing. "We are pleased that Long & McQuade was able to reduce the complexity, management, and cost of their aging infrastructure by implementing a complete 'datacenter in a box' that provides the performance and reliability that they wanted to be combined with the simplicity they needed."

Today is World Backup Day and a reminder to everyone about how important it is to backup your data. Why today? What better day than before April Fools Day to remember to be prepared for anything. You don’t want to be the fool who didn’t have a solid backup plan.

But what is a backup? Backing up business critical data is more complex than many people realize which may be why backup and disaster recovery plans fall apart in the hour of need. Let’s start with the basic definition: A backup is a second copy of your data you keep in case your primary data is lost or corrupted. Pretty simple. Unfortunately, that basic concept is not nearly enough to implement an effective backup strategy. You need some additional considerations.

1. Location – Where is your backup data stored? Is it on the same physical machine as your primary data? Is it in the same building? The closer your backup is to the primary data, the more chance your backup will suffer the same fate as your primary data. The best option is to have your backup offsite, physically removed from localized events that might cause data loss.
2. Recovery Point Objective – If you needed to recover from your backup, how much recent data would you lose? Was your last backup taken an hour ago, a day ago, or a week ago? How much potential revenue could be lost along with the data you can’t recover? Taking backups as frequently as possible is the best way to prevent data loss.
   Recovery Time Objective – How long will it take to recover your data? If you are taking backups every hour but it takes you several hours or longer to recover from a backup, was the hourly backup effective? Recovery time is as important as recovery point. Have a plan for rapid recovery.
3. System Backup – For a long time, backups only captured user and application data. Recovery was painful because the OS and applications needed to be rebuilt before restoring the data. These days, entire servers are usually what is backed up, increasing recovery speed.
4. Multiple Points in Time – Early on, many learned the hard way that keeping one backup is not enough. Multiple backups from different points in time were required for a number of reasons. Sometimes backups failed, sometimes data needed to be recovered from further back in time, and for some businesses, backups need to be kept for years for compliance. The more backups, the more points in time that data can be recovered from.
5. Backup Storage – One of the greatest challenges to backup over the decades has been storage. Keeping multiple copies of your data quickly starts consuming multiples of storage space. It just isn’t economical to require 10x or more of the storage of your primary data for backup. Incremental backups, compression, and deduplication have helped but backups still take lots of space. Calculating the storage requirements for your backup needs is essential.

Are snapshots backups? Sort of, but not really. Snapshots do provide recovery capabilities within a local system, but generally go down with the ship in any kind of real disaster. That being said, many backup solutions are designed around snapshots and use snapshots to create a real backup by copying the snapshot to an offsite location. These replicated snapshots are indeed backups that can be used for recovery just like any other form of backup.

Over the decades, there have been a variety of hardware, software, and service-based solutions to tackle backup and recovery. Within the last decade, there has been an increasing movement to include backup and recovery capabilities within operating systems, virtualization solutions, and storage solutions. This movement of turning backup into a feature rather than a secondary solution has only been gaining momentum.

With the hyperconvergence movement, where virtualization, servers, storage, and management are brought together into a single appliance-based solution, backup and disaster recovery are being included as well. Vendors like Scale Computing are providing all of the backup and disaster recovery capabilities you need. Scale Computing even offers their own cloud-based DRaaS as an option.

As we recently had April Fools Day, let’s remember that backup is no joke. Businesses rely on data and it is our job as IT professionals to protect against the loss of that data with backup. Take some time to review your backup plans and find out if you need to be doing more to prevent the next data loss event lurking around the corner.

Everyone in IT seems to have horror stories of failed backups, no backups, backups that were so old as to be useless. Let's celebrate Backup Day with some stories of your own disasters!

Happy Backup Day. Looking forward to seeing everyone online today.

We're thrilled that Scale Computing has made the shortlist for the DCS Awards "Data Centre Management Project of the Year." The DCS awards are designed to reward the product designers, manufacturers, suppliers and providers operating in data centre arena.

Please take a moment to vote for Scale Computing for "Date Centre Management Project of the Year"!

We'd Love It If You Come Vote for Us

Thanks guys!

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

A Dutch IT interview with Scale CEO @JeffReady as he talks about who Scale Computing is and what the Scale HC3 appliance can do.

Youtube Video

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/

The modern virtualization landscape includes newer technologies like cloud, hyperconvergence, and containers. As the hypervisor becomes more of a commodity underlying these technologies, the market dominance of VMware has eroded and KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V have been on the rise.

Join us with special guests System Administrator & Scale Customer, Trevor Pott and Scale Computing Co-Founder, Jason Collier as we discuss how the landscape of virtualization is evolving, and why many are choosing solutions based on hypervisors like KVM over the long-time market leader, VMware.

Date and time: Thursday, March 16, 2017 2:00 pm Eastern Daylight

Duration: 1 hour

Register Here

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage on Tuesday last week and was down for several hours. S3 is object storage for around 150,000 websites and other services according to SimilarTech. For IT professionals, here are four takeaways from this outage.

#1 – It Happens

No infrastructure in immune to outages. No matter how big the provider, outages happen and downtime occurs. Whether you are hosting infrastructure yourself or relying on a third party, outages will happen eventually. Putting your eggs in someone else’s basket does not necessarily buy you any more peace of mind. In this case, S3 was brought down by a simple typo from a single individual. That is as little as it takes to cause so much disruption. The premiums you pay to be hosted on a massive infrastructure like AWS will never prevent the inevitable failures, no matter how massive any platform becomes.

#2 – The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall

When a service is as massive as AWS, problems affect millions of users like customers trying to do businesses with companies using S3. Yes, outages do happen but do they have to take down so much of the internet with them when they do? Like the DDOS attack I blogged about last fall, companies leave themselves open to these massive outages when they rely heavily on public cloud services. How much more confidence in your business would your customers have if they heard about a massive outage on the news but knew that your systems were unaffected?

#3 – It’s No Use Being an Armchair Quarterback

When an outage occurs with your third party provider, you call, you monitor, and you wait. You hear about what is happening and all you can do is shake your fist in the air knowing that you probably could have done better to either prevent the issue or resolve it more quickly if you were in control. But you aren’t in any position to do anything because you are reliant on the hoster. You have no option but to simply accept the outage and try to make up for the loss to your business. You gave up your ability to fix the problem when you gave that responsibility to someone else.

Just two weeks ago, I blogged about private cloud and why some organizations feel they can’t rely on hosted solutions because of any number of failures they would have no control over. If you need control of your solution to mitigate risk, you can’t also give that control to a third party.

#4 – Have a Plan

Cloud services are a part of IT these days and most companies are already doing some form of hybrid cloud with some services hosted locally and some hosted in the cloud. Cloud-based applications like Salesforce, Office365, and Google Docs have millions of users. It is inevitable that some of your services will be cloud-based, but they don’t all have to be. There are plenty of solutions like hyperconverged infrastructure to host many services locally with the simplicity of cloud infrastructure. When outages at cloud providers occur, make sure you have sufficient infrastructure in place locally so that you can do more than just be an armchair quarterback.

Summary

Public cloud services may be part of your playbook but they don’t have to be your endgame. Take control of your data center and have the ability to navigate your business through outages without being at the mercy of third party providers. Have a plan, have an infrastructure, and be ready for the next time the internet breaks.