The HCI market appears to be growing.  And there are a number of factors driving that market growth including increasing demand for data protection and disaster recovery, highly scalable solutions and increased usage of virtualization.  But the market is not without its challenges either.  There have been quite a few entrants into the market over the years, making it difficult for some to choose, and a number of those vendors have been acquired or have gone out of business.  Recently, it was reported that Maxta had fallen on hard times and its future became unclear.  VMblog reached out to hyperconverged evangelist and co-founder of Scale Computing, Jason Collier, to get his take on the latest news and how it may impact his own company. 

VMblog:  The HCI market is evolving, yet reading the news about Maxta last week, it's clear customers really need to do their due diligence when picking a provider to support their future infrastructure.  Wouldn't you agree?  

Jason Collier:  Yes, we recently learned that Maxta, an HCI startup, is closing its doors. It's not the first HCI company to fold. But as the HCI market solidifies, vendors are going to need strong products with unique value propositions to survive. Being just another HCI vendor is not going to be enough. Although the market sees the value of HCI over traditional infrastructure architectures, solutions need to be easy to use and support their customers' exact use cases.

Scale Computing was established on the idea that IT infrastructure should be easier to use and cost less to manage and maintain. Based on this vision, we have been successful with our efficient architecture for both the SMB and for edge computing. That idea is reflected in the simplicity, scalability, high availability, and affordability of our HC3 virtualization platform.

VMblog:  How is Scale Computing managing in this market where other vendors have failed?

Collier:  We have just enjoyed a record breaking year of sales and growth. The reason is that we offer our customers what they need and through a number of strategic channels  - whether that's through our strategic partnerships - Lenovo or Google or Schneider Electric -  or through our growing network of value-added reseller partners. It's also because we are constantly evolving to match our customers' needs. Currently, we are seeing a huge increase in the need for smart solutions in a small footprint at the edge, as more and more organizations connect their distributed enterprises or grow their IoT infrastructure.

VMblog:  Customers need to pick an HCI provider that has a strong history of success and is financially stable, but don't you think customer experience and service is still important?

Collier:  An infrastructure solution is an investment, not just a commodity or impulse buy, so customer experience, service, and support are all very important. One single bad experience with a sales person, a customer support representative, or a service technician can ruin the entire customer relationship. It's not just important - it's essential.

Our technology is our foundation and we have won dozens of awards for HC3 and our HC3 Cloud Unity solutions for our innovation, technology, and market strategy. However, the best award we can get is the satisfaction of our customers. Scale Computing HC3 is the highest rated and best reviewed HCI solution by happy customers in Gartner Peer Insights, Spiceworks, TechValidate, and TrustRadius. We are focused on making our customers successful with the HCI solutions right for them, and we are here for the long term.

VMblog:  What about those organizations that were using Maxta.  What do they do now?

Collier:  As they are no longer going to be operating any sort of service, organizations that invested in Maxta are in a tough spot. As an infrastructure that is probably underpinning their business, this news likely affects many or all of their important applications and systems. Without the prospect of future updates and patches, their IT infrastructure is at risk.

If you are an orphaned Maxta customer we want to help. Scale Computing is offering a 25% discount on select Scale Computing HC3 solutions, as well as free installation and migration tools, to Maxta customers. They can fill out a pricing request, and in the comments field add "Maxta Customer". One of our HCI experts will get in touch right away.

VMblog:  Any other recent news Scale Computing can share?

Collier:  This week we also announced a new capability available in HC3 version 8.1 software: a way to rapidly access data from snapshots for uses like file-level recovery and more. This is done by cloning a virtual disk from a VM snapshot while that VM is live and mounting it for recovery - with one click.

This new file-level recovery capability is a great addition to the many backup and disaster recovery features already natively available on HC3. We've already been including flexible snapshot scheduling and retention management, replication, failover, failback, full VM recovery, and cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). While HC3 users can choose a third-party backup and disaster recovery solutions to use with HC3, many choose the simplicity and efficiency of the built-in features over purchasing additional solutions. 

HC3 has always been able to quickly recover entire VMs to previous snapshots. This new feature enables an administrator to very quickly recover individual files, virtual disks, or any other data that was accidentally deleted, corrupted, or otherwise lost. Read the blog post for more!

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