Scale Computing, the innovator in hyperconverged storage, server, and virtualization solutions for midsized users, today announced that Northland School Division No. 61 has deployed its HC3 Virtualization Platform to provide fault-tolerant protection of its mission-critical virtual machines in the most easy-to-use and easy-to-administer way possible.

Northland School Division No. 61 is recognized as being culturally and geographically unique. The division provides student-centered learning opportunities to 2,900 primarily First Nation and Métis students in 24 schools located across a 110,000-square mile territory in the northern half of Alberta, Canada.  With a staff of 550, including 200 teachers, Northland School Division strives to ensure that all students have the opportunity to acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to be self-reliant, responsible, caring and contributing members of their individual communities and the larger society.

Northland School Division had a Hyper-V system built on HP servers and SANs to provide for its mission-critical needs.  Configured as direct attached storage and not designed properly to provide the fault-tolerant protection required of its virtualized infrastructure, the IT team began to worry about what would happen to its virtual machines if one of its nodes failed.  After looking at options for replacing the existing infrastructure, the division decided to implement Scale Computing's HC3 platform after seeing a demonstration at a vendor conference.

"Once we saw that we could get the features we wanted with the fault tolerance we needed and the potential for some neat and tidy disaster recovery in a small footprint that was simple and easy to manage, then the Scale system made the most sense," said Jason Juneau, Network Administrator for Northland School Division No. 61.  "The ease of use of Scale was amazing and that's what won us over.  We don't have to be provisioning disk space on traditional SANs and LUNs and stuff like that.  It's very simple."

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. HC3 products make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.

"Educational organizations around the world would be well served to look to a hyperconverged approach when their existing infrastructure reaches the end of its useful life," said Jeff Ready, CEO and Co-founder of Scale Computing. "With no separate storage to buy, no servers needing to be managed and virtualization that's built into our all-in-one HC3 platform, we have made fault-tolerant data protection for the Northland School Division easy and cost effective compared to traditional physical or virtual deployments."