In the ever-evolving landscape of edge computing and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), Scale Computing stands out as a pioneering force dedicated to simplifying IT infrastructure. Founded 16 years ago, the company has established itself as a leading independent provider of edge computing, virtualization, and HCI solutions.
Scale Computing’s Chief Executive Officer, Board Member, and Co-founder, Jeff Ready, recently sat down with VMblog to discuss the company’s unique approach and differentiation in the edge computing and HCI market. Ready emphasized Scale Computing’s partner-focused model, built on a three-way partnership between the company, its partners, and customers, ensuring alignment with their needs and goals. Moreover, he highlighted the simplicity and ease of use of their solutions, particularly attractive to smaller businesses or distributed enterprises with limited IT staff. While many HCI vendors concentrate on data center solutions, Scale Computing places significant emphasis on the edge, engineering systems to perform in environments with limited space, unreliable network connectivity, and minimal IT support, making them ideal for remote locations and edge deployments.
VMblog: For those not already familiar with Scale Computing, can you provide us with a bit of background about the company and its solutions?
Jeff Ready: Scale Computing was founded by Scott Loughmiller and myself 16 years ago with a straightforward mission: to simplify IT infrastructure. Over the years, we’ve become one of the leading independent providers of edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. Today, we are proud to have more than 30,000 deployments across 120 countries, serving a broad spectrum of industry verticals.
Our flagship solution, the Scale Computing Platform, seamlessly integrates servers, virtualization, and storage into a single, user-friendly platform. This integration significantly lowers the cost barriers associated with keeping applications running, allowing our clients to focus on managing their applications rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
In addition, our Scale Computing HyperCore solution brings intelligent automation to the hypervisor and storage layers. It is designed to leverage low-cost, easily replaceable, and upgradeable commodity hardware components, including the virtualization capabilities inherent in modern CPU architectures. By clustering these components into a single, unified, and redundant system, we deliver a flexible and comprehensive “data center-in-a-box” solution.
VMblog: Who does Scale Computing primarily compete with and what are some of the key ways you differentiate yourself in the edge computing/HCI market?
Ready: Scale Computing primarily competes with large virtualization vendors such as VMware and other hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendors like Nutanix. However, we distinguish ourselves in the edge computing and HCI market in several key ways.
From the very beginning, Scale Computing has been partner-focused. Our approach is built on a three-way partnership: between us and our partners, us and our customers, and between our partners and customers. This collaborative model ensures that we are aligned with our clients’ and partners’ needs and goals, fostering a supportive ecosystem that drives mutual success.
But perhaps our biggest differentiator is the simplicity and ease of use of our solutions. We offer our customers and partners a streamlined management interface that reduces the complexity typically associated with managing virtualized environments. This simplicity is particularly appealing to smaller businesses or distributed enterprises that often don’t have a lot of dedicated IT staff on hand.
While many HCI vendors concentrate on data center solutions, we place significant emphasis on the edge. Our systems are engineered to perform in environments with limited space, unreliable network connectivity, and minimal IT support, making them ideal for remote locations and edge deployments.
VMblog: Obviously, the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom last year has created a lot of chaos in the virtualization market in general. How has that disruption impacted your business and what are you doing to capitalize on the FUD?
Ready: The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has indeed caused significant disruption in the virtualization market. After Broadcom announced its plans to acquire VMware, many in the industry wondered if they would employ the same ‘profit harvesting’ playbook they used with Symantec and Computer Associates. Profit harvesting is a strategy where financial gains are maximized by minimizing investment once a product reaches maturity, often at the expense of innovation and customer satisfaction.
Broadcom’s stated strategy is straightforward: focus on their top 600 customers, who will find it difficult to switch suppliers, cut sales and marketing costs by concentrating on this smaller pool of high-margin customers, and minimize R&D spending by ignoring the needs of other customers. While this might be great for Broadcom’s bottom line, it’s not so great for most of VMware’s customer base, particularly for partners being bypassed as Broadcom establishes direct relationships with these strategic accounts. This approach has led to massive price hikes for many customers. For example, one children’s hospital saw their costs increase by 14 times, and when they asked for a reprieve as a non-profit, they were simply told, “Sorry, VMware isn’t for everyone.”
At Scale Computing, we see this disruption as a massive opportunity. Unlike Broadcom, we believe there is still plenty of room for innovation in the virtualization market. We are continuing to invest heavily in R&D and remain committed to developing cutting-edge solutions that meet our customers’ evolving needs.
Regarding the channel, our approach is fundamentally different. We don’t just offer another way to do VMware; we provide a better way to do business. Our focus is on building long-term relationships with our customers and partners. Whether you’re a long-term customer or new to Scale Computing, we are committed to investing time, money, and effort to ensure a successful partnership. This is the opposite of profit harvesting. We are willing to sacrifice short-term gains to build lasting value and trust.
As such, we have developed programs that work symbiotically with our partners with the goal of providing an off-ramp for customers who are dissatisfied with the direction VMware is heading under Broadcom. Some of these programs include our Rip & Replace program designed for partners to give them additional tools, training, discounts, and margin to bring VMware customers over, as well as our Seamless Switch: Trade-Up to Scale Computing program, which offers a full system exchange opportunity for both hardware and software. By offering a user-friendly, cost-effective, and innovative alternative, we aim to attract those looking for stability and a partner that’s aligned with their goals over the long haul.
VMblog: You recently hosted your second annual customer conference called Platform//2024 in Las Vegas, what were some of the more compelling customer use cases that were shared?
Ready: Indeed, it was a fantastic event and an amazing opportunity for our staff, customers, and partners to share best practices and see firsthand how Scale Computing solutions are being used in the real world. We hosted more than 500 IT Professionals and Partners from across the globe at Resorts World, one of the newest properties on the Las Vegas strip (and incidentally also a Scale Computing customer who uses the SC//Platform to manage their on-premise surveillance system).
At this year’s event, customers representing a broad spectrum of industries shared some of their use cases, including In-N-Out Burgers, Syracuse University, Summit County Board of Elections, Kingston Police, and Kolbe Windows and Doors. While these customers represent a broad spectrum of use cases, they all share a few common traits: constrained budgets, limited IT personnel on hand, and a need for reliable, easy-to-manage infrastructure.
For instance, In-N-Out Burgers shared a fascinating edge computing use case where they deployed Scale Computing to manage a fleet of semi-sized cook-out trucks at off-site events where they usually couldn’t accept cash and credit cards for payment. With a 3-node cluster, they could spin up a new set of virtual machines and run them over a 4g/5g wireless network and even dial into it to provide remote support. We also heard from customers like Kingston Police who shared their experience of how they use the SC//Platform to support their critical 911 services which obviously can’t afford even the smallest amount of downtime.
VMblog: How do you see the edge computing market in general shaping up over the next few years and what kind of opportunities are you seeing for MSPs to differentiate their service portfolio?
Ready: According to Gartner, by 2027, 75% of all workloads and data will be processed at the edge. When we think of the edge, we often picture something existing way off in a remote part of the network, but it’s actually much closer and integral to daily operations in many industries. As more sensors and other IoT devices are added to the network edge, the more data that needs to be processed and analyzed.
This is why we’re now seeing the rise of the ‘intelligent edge’, where intelligence via software is brought directly to the data at the edge of the network. This intelligence is critical because it allows for faster data processing and real-time decision-making, essential for applications in various fields, especially for industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail.
This shift to edge computing presents numerous opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) to differentiate their service portfolios. For instance, MSPs can provide specialized edge computing solutions that address the unique challenges of processing data at the edge – from deploying and managing edge devices to ensuring data security and optimizing network performance.
As organizations shift more of their workloads to the edge, there will be a growing need for managed services to support these deployments which means MSPs can offer a range of services, including remote monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting for edge environments. Given the sheer volume of data that’s being generated at the edge, there will be an even greater opportunity for MSPs to add value by helping customers leverage data analytics and AI to grow their businesses.
VMblog: What are some of the key things we should expect to see in Scale Computing’s product roadmap over the next 18 months?
Ready: Over the next 18 months, we have an ambitious product roadmap that will bring several key enhancements and new offerings to our customers and partners. Here are some of the highlights you can expect:
- Enhanced HyperCore Functionality: Based on feedback from users transitioning from VMware, we’re making several improvements to our HyperCore software platform. First, we are introducing streamlined node lifecycle management to radically simplify adding, removing, and replacing nodes across a fleet of clusters. We will also continue to double down on the ability to deploy and manage containerized applications at the edge. Making containers as easy to deploy and manage as VMs is crucial to the continued success of HyperCore and we look forward to introducing new application management and orchestration features over the coming months. Going hand in hand with next-generation application support, we are implementing Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). SR-IOV is part of a broader set of virtualization technologies aimed at optimizing and managing physical resources more efficiently in a virtualized environment…and while we are introducing this technology to support Nvidia GPUs, the same standard applies to a huge variety of other hardware devices (NICs, GPUs, DPUs, Neural Processing Units, etc.) which gives us the power to continue making use of new hardware technologies at the edge. While these functions will provide crucial improvements, we will also continue implementing quality-of-life enhancements to delight new and existing customers.
- Expanded Hardware Compatibility and Options: We are committed to broadening our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and offering more hardware options and configurations to run the SC//Platform. This expansion will give our customers greater flexibility and choice in deploying our solutions to their specific needs. We also plan to introduce support for 2-node clusters, which will provide high availability and rolling updates similar to a 3-node cluster but with a lower total cost of ownership.
- Managed Migration Services: To make transitions as smooth as possible, we’re rolling out managed migration services. This means we’ll handle the migration process for our customers, ensuring ease of use and minimizing their need to learn new technologies or workflows. We’ve implemented tiered pricing for this service, making it more affordable as the number of servers increases, ultimately saving time and energy for our clients. In addition, we plan to establish a Partner Deployment Network to leverage our partners as an extension of Scale Computing’s service delivery.
- Proactive Fleet Monitoring: We’re introducing a proactive fleet monitoring subscription service, designed to save time and add value for our customers and partners. This service will monitor systems automatically, generating support tickets proactively to address issues before they become major problems. This will reduce the average time spent resolving support cases and mitigate risks by taking care of smaller issues along the way.
VMblog: Another big piece of news last Summer was Intel’s decision to discontinue its NUC line of small-form PCs that have proved popular with Remote Office Back Office (ROBO) settings and other industry verticals like retail and maritime. How are you supporting those customers now and what innovations are you seeing in the small-factor PC market?
Ready: It’s important to clarify that Intel hasn’t completely exited the NUC business. Instead, they’re enabling their partners to create products similar to the NUC, such as those offered by our partner Simply NUC. In fact, the CEO of Simply NUC, presented at our recent Platform event, talked about both the technical capabilities of these mini-PC systems and how they are being deployed in various diverse edge environments.
One of the key advantages of these compact devices is their ability to be used for anything, practically everywhere. Incredibly, an entire PC can now fit inside a 4-inch square device that you can hold in the palm of your hand. As compute capacity remains a constant requirement at the edge – especially with AI inferencing driving the ‘extreme edge’ in sectors like manufacturing, retail, quick-service restaurants (QSR), and multisite environments – the demand for powerful, efficient, and cost-effective computing solutions is only going to grow.
However, it’s important to emphasize that our approach is not just about delivering off-the-shelf hardware. We are committed to wrapping services and solutions around these units to ensure they are truly fit for purpose. This means we can customize and configure them according to a customer’s specific requirements and deliver a turnkey solution that can be deployed quickly and efficiently.
VMblog: Container usage at the edge seems to be gaining broader adoption of late. How does running Kubernetes on Scale Computing’s HyperCore enhance application deployment and scalability for your customers?
Ready: Gartner is projecting that by 2028, 80% of custom software running at the edge will be deployed via containers, up from 10% last year. For Scale Computing customers, Kubernetes integration with our HyperCore platform transforms how they deploy and scale their applications, particularly in edge environments. The simplicity of managing containerized applications on HyperCore enables customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes with ease, reducing the administrative burden and enabling a focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.
Moreover, the architecture of HyperCore is inherently designed for high scalability, making it ideal for Kubernetes applications that need to scale dynamically in response to real-time demands. This capability is particularly valuable in edge environments, where some workloads must be rapidly scaled without downtime. The reliability of our platform also ensures that Kubernetes applications run seamlessly, maintaining high availability and performance even under challenging conditions typical of edge computing.
VMblog: What are some of the tools and services offered by Scale Computing that support multi-cloud or cloud-to-edge environments?
Ready: Modern IT environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, often spanning multiple clouds and edge locations. To support these different environments, we offer a range of tools and services designed to integrate multi-cloud and cloud-to-edge deployments. Our flagship SC//Platform can be deployed across various environments, from traditional data centers to remote edge locations, and even in the cloud. Likewise, SC//HyperCore brings intelligent automation to the hypervisor and storage layers, simplifying management and optimizing resource utilization which is particularly valuable in cloud-to-edge environments where resources need to be efficiently managed across a range of locations.
For multi-cloud environments, we offer Scale Computing Fleet Manager which provides centralized management for all SC//Platform deployments, regardless of their location. Whether your infrastructure is on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Fleet Manager delivers a single pane of glass for monitoring, managing, and optimizing your entire IT ecosystem.
We also recognize the importance of seamless data mobility between cloud and edge environments. Our Cloud Unity solution enables hybrid cloud capabilities, allowing customers to easily move workloads between their on-premises infrastructure and public cloud provider. This flexibility ensures that you can leverage the cloud’s scalability while maintaining control over your edge deployments.
VMblog: For distributed organizations looking to streamline IT operations, how does Scale Computing’s Zero Touch Provisioning capabilities stand out from other solutions?
Ready: The idea behind Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is to provide cloud-like simplicity for administrators who are managing a distributed fleet of clusters. Using ZTP, IT admins can remotely input a cluster configuration in SC//Fleet Manager before nodes arrive on-premises, which reduces installation time by 90% or more. And since everything is centrally administered, there’s no need for on-site IT personnel, which is a game-changer for organizations that have dozens or even thousands of locations. This is the first zero-touch provisioning solution with the cloud-like simplicity and speed needed for edge computing projects, providing the shortest time from pilot to production.
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