Posts made by scale

And at the end of the year, Scale makes the final list, too.

Scale Computing wins ‘hyperconverged solution of the year’ award at the 2017 SVC Awards

London, U.K., -- Scale Computing, the market leader in hyperconverged solutions for midsized companies, today announced that its innovative HC3 appliance has been awarded ‘hyperconverged solution of the year’, at the 2017 SVC Awards. Built with simplicity in mind, the HC3 appliance integrates storage, servers and virtualisation software into one easy-to-use solution, providing a complete data centre in a box.

The annual SVC Awards recently took place in London to celebrate and reward this year’s leading companies in storage, cloud and digitalisation. The awards recognise end user, channel, technology and innovation success. With thousands of public votes cast and the IT industry’s leading executives in attendance, the ceremony highlights the achievements and excellence of organisations leading the way in the technology sector.

Scale Computing’s HC3 appliance provides availability, scalability and affordability. It is self-healing and as easy to manage as a single server. Using industry standard components, the HC3 appliance can be installed in under an hour and expanded and upgraded with no downtime. In addition, with no external virtualisation software to licence the appliance lowers out of pocket expenses.

“Scale Computing is committed to delivering a leading hyperconverged solution that is built and designed to meet our customers’ needs, commented Johan Pellicaan, Managing Director and VP EMEA at Scale Computing. “We are honoured to have been awarded hyperconverged solution of the year, and this reinforces our continued efforts in the industry. We are seeing more customers require a converged solution, and Scale is uniquely positioned to offer a scalable, easy to use and cost-effective appliance that will meet growing business demands.”

While HC3 provides both a great built in "at a glance" view of active conditions that require attention as well as proactive remote notification emails to find you if you are out on the golf course ... or just doing other things Sometimes you also want those events and actions to be monitored elsewhere as well. Fortunately - all activity that is displayed in the "Cluster Log" portion of the UI can also be sent to a remote syslog server for collection, reporting and analysis

For my own "lab" I have used the free edition of Splunk Light to collect syslog events from multiple HC3 clusters and even build a crude little dashboard to highlight what I care about (perhaps another post some time) ... but we have been asked about Microsoft System Center a few times so I decided to try it out. Turns out it is pretty easy to configure SCOM to receive and process / filter syslog events sent from a HC3 cluster as shown below... and obviously there are tons of other tools that could do the same. If there is a need I could probably share the steps I went through to create rules but I'm guessing SCOM admins are already way ahead of me there...

There are a few useful docs on our portal relating to syslog in general
Partners
Customers

and Splunk LIght proof of concept that may be of interest
Partners
Customers

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and after some rule creation to categorize different severity levels
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Did you know you can add hyperlinks into the VM description field in the web UI to launch application specific web based management tools (or anything really) ... currently it does require a valid DNS name (IP addresses aren't allowed currently) but does support specifying the port to connect to and even multiple hyperlinks per VM ... just click the hyperlink and away you go ...

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HC3 uses the KVM hypervisor which can provide para-virtualized devices to the guest OS which will decrease latency and improve performance for the virtual devices. Virtio is the standard used by KVM. We recommend selecting performance drivers for any supported OS which creates Virtio block devices. Emulated block devices are also supported for legacy operating systems.

Virtio driver support has been built into the Linux Kernel since 2.6.25. Any Linux distro utilizing a 2.6.25 or later distro will natively support Virtio network and storage block devices presented by HC3. Older kernels can potentially allow the Virtio modules to be backported. Any modern Linux distro should be on a Kernel version late enough to natively support Virtio.

Virtio drivers for Windows OSs are available for guest and server platforms starting at Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Any Windows OS beyond those will have Virtio driver support as well. Any OS older than XP or Server 2003 will have to use the emulated non-performance block device type and will experience decreased performance compared to more modern OSs.

At Scale Computing, we periodically update the Virtio performance drivers provided with HC3 via firmware updates. We recommend only using the included Virtio ISO or one provided by Scale Support. Untested Virtio drivers could cause an inability to livemigrate VMs or other issues. New Virtio drivers will not be automatically added to guest VMs. You will need to mount the ISO CD to the VM and manually install the updated drivers via device manager. You can also utilize group policy to roll out updates of virtio drivers when they are available

A: There are several options for converting existing workloads to run on HC3. For Windows and Linux VMs, Scale has partnered with Carbonite and their Double-Take product to offer HC3 Move which can be used to migrate physical (P2V) and virtual (V2V) workloads onto HC3. It requires near zero downtime and gives the user ultimate control of deciding when to cut over from their source machine onto the HC3 platform.

In addition to HC3 Move, any backup solution that supports full system bare metal recovery can be used to transfer workloads onto HC3. In some cases virtual machine formats like VMDK can be directly imported to HC3 from other hypervisors (Veeam Example).

For those users who would like assistance in the migration, Scale also offers services that can do everything from showing end users how to use the HC3 Move tool while performing a single migration (Quickstart service) to performing the entire migration in a full services engagement.

For more information on other Migration processes and troubleshooting, on the Scale customer or partner portal search for the following documents:

x2v concepts - P2V/V2V Concepts for the Scale HC3 Cluster

• General discussion of migration issues and troubleshooting
  on partner portal or the on customer portal

on that page you will also find information on some additional tools including:

clonezilla - P2V and V2V Migrations with Clonezilla and HC3

• Free open source tool that can migrate existing physical and virtual machines into HC3 VMs
  and

P2V/V2V with Acronis and the Scale HC3 Cluster

Other documents available include:

foreign vm import - Import a Foreign VM or Appliance into HC3 Using the HC3 Web Interface

• free way to directly import many offline virtual disk formats into HC3 - vmdk, vhd, ova
  on partner portal
  on customer portal

More information on Migration to HC3.

Filtering is a pretty powerful, but often overlooked feature in HC3. It gives users the ability to filter down to a subset of VMs based on various attributes and apply actions such as Power On/Off, Snapshot, Clone, etc. One of the easily overlooked capabilities built into the filter is the logical operators of AND (using a " ") and OR (using a ",").

Here's a brief video showing Scale Computing's HC3 Bulk Actions and Filtered Search in action:

Youtube Video

the , for OR also works in the cluster log filter. among other things that can be useful to filter out "cluster" events such as replication (in HCOS 7.3 + that have multiple login users). Could also be useful to view CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING messages.

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Today, I am proud to formally announce the new online Scale Legion User Community.

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What is Scale Legion? Scale Legion is a user community that started over a year ago with onsite meetings for users of Scale Computing solutions. Our very own Shane Weinbrecht, Legionnaire Prime, has been the driving force behind Scale Legion and has done a great job bringing users together. This new online community is the next step in enhancing the Scale Computing user experience.

One thing I hear often around the office is that we have the best users/customers at Scale Computing. I haven’t had a reason to disagree. Our customers are not just innovative early adopters of hyperconverged infrastructure, they are also our biggest proponents.

But Scale Computing is not just for our customers and users, it is for anyone interested in hyperconverged infrastructure and the future of IT infrastructure. We have a variety of topics already started under categories like:

• TechJam
• HC3 Tips and Tricks
• VM Backup, Snapshots, Replication
• Windows and Applications on HC3
• Linux and Open Source on HC3

So please, join us on the Scale Legion online community in discussing your IT experiences with or without HC3, get your questions answered, and be part of the growing technology movements around hyperconverged infrastructure, edge computing, hybrid cloud, and more.

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https://scalelegion.community/

Scale Computing Leads The Edge Charge With First Hyper-Converged System Built For Edge Computing on CRN.

Scale Computing is doubling down on its investments around the edge with the launch of the industry's first hyper-converged system that is purpose-built for edge computing environments.

Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing, said that the company's new offering, HC3 Edge, gives customers the benefits of the company's HC3 on-premises appliance-based hyper-converged infrastructure on small form factors that meet edge requirements.

"We are seeing strong demand from our customers for HCI [Hyper-Converged] at the edge, especially among our large retail, manufacturing, and healthcare verticals where a combination of factors, including IoT adoption, are increasing on-prem demands," said Ready, CEO of Scale Computing. "Customers need flexibility both now and in the future. What we are providing at Scale is a single platform spanning on-premises, cloud, and edge computing that will serve our customers well in the decade to come."

In the last few years, we’ve enjoyed a wide variety of options for IT infrastructure including public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, and more. Despite these many options, a new need has arisen in the form of edge computing. What is edge computing and why is it needed? I’m glad you asked.

What is it? Edge computing is the necessity for on-prem IT infrastructure resources outside of the typical datacenter. These edge computing resource needs are small, not requiring a full datacenter or even a small datacenter implementation. Edge computing may require infrastructure as small as an IoT device, or infrastructure as large as a micro-datacenter of multiple compute appliances.

If you are imagining edge computing in the context of remote office/branch office computing, you aren’t wrong, but edge computing can also be adjacent to manufacturing systems, medical equipment, point of sales, IoT devices, and more. The needs of edge computing are widespread across every industry.

But why edge computing and not simply cloud? Cloud computing has many benefits, especially scalability and elasticity, however the almighty cloud is not without its limits. Chief among these limits are internet connectivity and latency. On-prem infrastructure assets for edge computing provide more reliable performance and connectivity to keep systems operational even if internet connectivity fails.

Unlike full datacenter implementations, edge computing is small enough to not warrant dedicated IT staff, therefore the infrastructure needs to be easy to implement and manage, as well as easily connected back to the primary datacenter and even the cloud as needed. These requirements are what make hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology well-suited to edge computing.

Introducing HC3 Edge. Scale Computing was not only one of the first to provide HCI solutions, but has become a market leader by providing solutions small enough and at a low enough cost to satisfy the needs of some of the smallest businesses. HC3 systems are not only known for being low cost, but also for being extremely easy to manage and easily scalable.

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HC3 Edge is a range of customized HC3 systems that can be as small as an IoT device with an Intel Atom processor or range up to a multi-appliance micro-datacenter. The advantage of HC3 for edge computing is a combination of the efficient performance, ease of use, and integration with public cloud and private cloud HC3 systems.

Not a stripped-down system, HC3 Edge has all of the features and functionality of mainline HC3 systems and can be a managed along with HC3, HC3 Cloud Unity, and other HC3 Edge systems from a single multi-system management interface. HC3 Edge is the edge computing component for your complete hybrid IT infrastructure.

@tim_g said in Best practice partition & LVM for KVM:

@scale said in Best practice partition & LVM for KVM:

@fateknollogee said in Best practice partition & LVM for KVM:

btw, does @scale use Fedora or CentOS for their appliances?

Our distribution is officially SCEL, Scale Computing Enterprise Linux.

We start from CentOS 7, but obviously the changes are pretty significant. So it's only a reference starting point, it's not a CentOS system any longer.

Ah, so basically a fork from CentOS 7 then.

Basically, yes. It starts from there.

@fateknollogee said in Best practice partition & LVM for KVM:

btw, does @scale use Fedora or CentOS for their appliances?

Our distribution is officially SCEL, Scale Computing Enterprise Linux.

We start from CentOS 7, but obviously the changes are pretty significant. So it's only a reference starting point, it's not a CentOS system any longer.

Introduction

The term hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has become an industry buzzword that has been applied to a number of
different new computing technologies. The misuse of the term has caused confusion for many IT professionals looking
at HCI as an infrastructure solution. In this document we will shed some light on what HCI really means and why it might
be the right IT solution for you.

The Inverted Pyramid of Doom

Before HCI and converged infrastructure, virtualized infrastructure was organized into what we now call a 3-2-1 architecture
(or the inverted pyramid of doom). This 3-2-1 architecture consists of VMs running on 3 or more clustered host
servers connected by 2 network switches and backed by 1 or more shared storage appliances (SAN/NAS).

When virtualization first arrived in the market, the physical server model was dominating IT infrastructure. As a software
solution, virtualization required the existing physical servers as well as shared storage technologies like SAN and NAS to
survive and thrive.

The 3-2-1 architecture was the result of combining these existing hardware components into clusters. Unfortunately, these
hardware components were never designed for virtualization and were typically from different vendors.

The 3-2-1 architecture has led to a number of challenges, the most obvious being the complexity. Not only do these
various layers each have their own management systems, but they each have their own individual support services.
Each vendor component solution seemed to require its own training and certifications, and many IT departments have
found themselves needing to hire multiple specialized experts either internally or as external consultants to cover these
varying components. Dealing with compatibility issues between different vendor solutions such as ensuring vendor X
solution’s update level is compatible with vendor Y solution’s update level can be challenging for even the highest priced
experts.

Another issue in the 3-2-1 architecture is expandability, both in terms of capacity and performance. Shared storage
appliances tend to be monolithic and only be designed to scale up by filling empty drive bays. When the system requires
bigger or faster storage in a 3-2-1 architecture, that often means having to swap out with a bigger, faster, and more
costly storage appliance. The same idea applies when better or faster hardware is needed in the physical server (RAM,
CPU, etc): costly upgrades, expensive downtime, and a hefty administrative workload to complete the project.
The final, and the potentially fatal, flaw for the IT department utilizing 3-2-1 architecture is the storage. Being the “1” in
the 3-2-1, storage represents a single point of failure for the entire architecture (leading to the “Inverted Pyramid of
Doom” moniker). While many storage devices can be implemented redundantly, redundancy usually means more than
double the cost of the storage, already an expensive component. Instead, many organizations rely on backups and
prayers to protect against the catastrophic failure of the storage layer.

Despite all of its flaws, the 3-2-1 architecture did get the job done in terms of delivering features like high availability, VM
live migration (aka vMotion), and cluster-wide shared storage. It was also the only viable way to effectively implement
virtualization for many years. Luckily, there are now other alternatives to this architecture profile.

Converged Infrastructure

Before HCI, there was converged infrastructure. To tackle the complexity of the 3-2-1 architecture, the idea of converged
infrastructure was to combine some of the different component layers into a single “system” and SKU, most often combining servers and storage. Sold as a single system, the hardware and software components were pre-tested together to avoid incompatibility issues and speed up deployment time. However, these “converged” solutions were generally the
same separate components, just pre-installed, pre-wired and delivered in a rack.

The next stage in converged infrastructure was combining and integrating the different components into a single appliance. It wasn’t difficult to add more compute resources to a storage appliance in order to run virtual machines, and that’s what some vendor solutions offered. Clustering would make the storage appliances highly available.
Generally, converged infrastructure solutions were meant to be hardware platforms onto which 3rd party hypervisors like
VMware or Hyper-V could be installed with relative ease. These converged infrastructure appliance solutions are primarily
what exists in the market today; most have adopted the term hyperconverged infrastructure due to the buzz factor.

The problem with converged infrastructure solutions is that they generally mimic the same storage architectures as the
3-2-1. These clustered, converged storage and compute solutions relied on virtual storage appliances (VSAs) running as
VMs to manage storage in a similar way that shared SAN and NAS controllers functioned. VSAs are the best example of
this problem as they effectively virtualize all the inefficiencies of the SAN architecture from the 3-2-1. VSAs consume large
amounts of CPU and RAM from the appliance, keeping it from being used by other virtual machines.

Because the hypervisor and storage are still from two different vendors in these converged solutions, the VMs must
consume the storage through a number of protocols and files system layers (and VSAs) that reduce storage efficiency.
Each of these layers, including VSA, adds hops to the data I/O path. Only the emergence of flash storage has enabled
these converged infrastructure solutions to provide efficient storage for virtualization.

The Real Meaning of ‘Hyperconverged’

When the term ‘hyperconverged’ was coined, it meant a converged infrastructure solution that natively included the
hypervisor for virtualization. The “hyper” wasn’t just hype as it is today. This is an important distinction because it has
specific implications for how the architecture can be designed for greater storage efficiency and simplicity.

Who can provide a native hypervisor? Anyone can, really. Hypervisors have become a market commodity with very little
feature difference between them. With free, open source hypervisors like KVM, anyone can build on KVM to create a
hypervisor unique and specialized to the hardware they provide in their hyperconverged appliances. Many vendors still
choose to stay with converged infrastructure models, perhaps banking on the market dominance of VMware―even with
many consumers fleeing the high prices of VMware licensing.

Saving money is only one of the benefits of HCI. By utilizing a native hypervisor, the storage can be architected and
embedded directly with the hypervisor, eliminating inefficient storage protocols, files systems, and VSAs. The most
efficient data paths allow direct access between the VM and the storage; this has only been achieved when the hypervisor
vendor is the same as the storage vendor. When the vendor owns the components, it can design the hypervisor and
storage to directly interact, resulting in a huge increase in efficiency and performance.

In addition to storage efficiency, having the hypervisor included natively in the solution eliminates another vendor which
increases management efficiency. A single vendor that provides the servers, storage, and hypervisor makes the overall
solution much easier to support, update, patch, and manage without the traditional compatibility issues and vendor
finger-pointing. Ease of management represents a significant savings in both time and training from the IT budget.
What about the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been around even longer than HCI and many have already begun implementing the cloud into their
IT infrastructure in various ways. Most market indicators are pointed toward organizations using a combination of on-prem
infrastructure with cloud-based infrastructure or services in what may be called hybrid cloud architectures.

As a fully functional virtualization platform, HCI can nearly always be implemented alongside other infrastructure solutions
as well as integrated with cloud computing. For example, with nested virtualization in cloud platforms, an HCI solution like
HC3 Cloud UnityTM from Scale Computing can be extended into the cloud for a unified management experience.
Not only does HCI work alongside and integrated with cloud computing but it offers many of the benefits of cloud computing

in terms of simplicity and ease-of-management on premises. In fact, for most organizations, HCI may be the private
cloud solution that is best suited to their environment. Like cloud computing, HCI is so simple to manage that it lets IT
administrators focus on apps and workloads rather than managing infrastructure all day as is common in 3-2-1. HCI is not
only fast and easy to implement, but it can be scaled out quickly when needed. HCI should definitely be considered along
with cloud computing for data center modernization.

What does Hyperconverged Infrastructure Include?

Although there are some software-only solutions that call themselves HCI, appliance-based HCI hardware solutions offer
additional benefits. Not only can a combined solution of hardware and software in an appliance be more thoroughly tested
to avoid instability, but single-vendor support provided for a HCI appliance can cover both hardware and software
seamlessly. An HCI appliance can include server compute resources, the storage, preferably the hypervisor, and often
disaster recovery and backup features. HCI is sometimes referred to as a “datacenter in a box” because, after the initial
cabling and minimal networking configuration, it has all of the features and functionality of the traditional 3-2-1 virtualization architecture.

Clustering

Although HCI can sometimes be deployed as a single appliance for selected use cases, it is usually deployed as a cluster
of appliances for high availability. This way, not only can an appliance absorb the loss of a disk drive, but the cluster can
absorb the loss of an entire appliance. Clustering also allows the HCI system to scale seamlessly by adding more
appliances to the cluster. Some HCI solutions require clustering appliances of the same model and configuration while
others (like Scale Computing’s HC3 system) allow clustering of dissimilar appliances.

Management

HCI solutions can generally be managed from a single management interface, eliminating the multiple management
consoles and interfaces found in 3-2-1 architectures. This is not necessarily the case for HCI solutions using 3rd party
hypervisors which typically end up using 2 interfaces. For HCI with a native hypervisor included, this single interface
approach significantly reduces management time and effort and simplifies management tasks for the administrator.
Rapid Deployment

HCI systems can be deployed more rapidly than other virtualization solutions because of the appliance-based
architecture. Racking and networking are often the most time consuming factors in implementation. Deployment times
vary by vendor, especially if there is a 3rd party hypervisor to install and VSAs to configure but with a native hypervisor
pre-loaded (as with Scale Computing’s HC3 system), an entire cluster of appliances can be up and running in under an
hour.

Software and Hardware Updates

Doing regular system software and firmware updates can be a dreaded task but HCI tends to make this process easy. By
owning the entire virtualization/server/storage stack and operating in a highly available cluster, updates can be performed
automatically across the entire cluster. All software layers (hardware firmware, hypervisor, storage, and management) can
be upgraded in unison as a single, fully tested system to eliminate component compatibility concerns. VMs can be
automatically moved from appliance to appliance in the cluster as updates are made to keep all systems operational. HCI
can eliminate downtime and headaches when performing updates, as seen in the Scale Computing HC3 system.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and disaster recovery are included at no extra cost in some HCI solutions to help eliminate yet another vendor
from your IT environment. And truly, backup, failover, failback, and recovery should be a part of every IT environment. In
that line of thought, it makes perfect sense to include these features natively in HCI solutions. Unlike 3rd party solutions,
native solutions are typically embedded in the storage layer and allow innate awareness of block changes for cleaner
backup, replication, and recovery options.

Lower Cost of Ownership

HCI may not always be the lowest cost solution in terms of the initial Capex investment―although it often is because
the ease of scalability allows organizations to purchase only the needed appliances and does not require excessive
over-provisioning in the initial investment. Buying only what you need when you need it can lead to significant savings.
In addition to Capex savings, HCI provides considerable Opex savings over time by greatly reducing the costs of
management and maintenance. Simplifying an IT environment with HCI can save over 50% in the total cost of ownership
over 3-2-1 solutions.

Who Should Use Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed as a replacement for 3-2-1 architecture to eliminate excess cost and complexity.
Therefore, it can benefit any size organization that requires a robust virtualization environment. However, the extreme
simplicity of HCI makes it most beneficial in use cases where IT staff is limited. Small and medium business (SMB) and
distributed enterprises with many remote offices or branch offices (ROBO) typically have staffing issues that make HCI an
ideal choice.

In SMB, the entire IT staff may be as small as only one full-time or even part-time IT administrator. The complexity of a
3-2-1 architecture can be extremely challenging. It can require levels of training and certification that make managing
administrators either under-trained or too expensive to afford. The simplicity of HCI, in turn, can allow it to be managed
easily by a junior administrator or allow a more senior administrator to simply spend less time managing the infrastructure
and more time delivering better applications and services and improving the business.

In a distributed enterprise, remote offices and branch offices rarely have dedicated IT staff. These remote locations often
require frequent visits from IT staff which can result in high travel costs and lower productivity. The simplicity of HCI
includes multiple redundancies for high availability, failure handling, and self healing. A failed drive at a remote site does
not cause an outage and does not require immediate replacement, cutting down on IT staff visits. Greater uptime and
accessible remote monitoring and management lead to lower travel costs of IT staff to these locations and significantly
lower operating costs―not to mention the increase in productivity.

Summary

Hyperconverged infrastructure is not only a buzzword. It is a revolutionary way of thinking about IT infrastructure that
reduces IT investments in terms of both money and manpower. Although it may be difficult to determine whether a solution
is truly hyperconverged, just converged, or some other pretender, it is worth investigating HCI solutions to make sure your
organization can gain the maximum benefit of modern IT infrastructure.

Ask HCI vendors some of the following questions when you’re exploring HCI solutions:

• Does the solution provide a native hypervisor or does it require an additional purchase of hypervisor licensing
and support?
• Does the solution offer hypervisor-embedded storage or does it use virtual storage appliances (VSAs)?
• Can the solution combine and scale with dissimilar appliance models and configurations?
• Does the solution offer native backup and disaster recovery capabilities?
• Does the solution integrate with cloud computing?

As the IT industry continues to evolve, HCI is the next logical step in on-prem and cloud-integrated virtualization
infrastructure. Standing still with more traditional virtualization solutions like the 3-2-1 architecture may end up costing
organizations far more in capital, manpower, and training than switching over to the simplicity and savings of a HCI solution.

Speaking at Schneider Electric’s recent partner event at their HQ, Le Hive, in Paris, Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys, looked to the future of technology, predicting that we are entering a new era of IT investment. IT optimization, agility, and innovation, he argued, are driving interest in a range of technologies – from hybrid IT and automation to hyperconvergence, cloud, and edge computing – among others.

For those at the sharp end – the organizations investing in these technologies to bring new products and services to market – the opportunities are enormous. But rapid change like this also brings major challenges, chief among them being cost control and the exploding levels of complexity. If that wasn’t enough, our collective focus on progress comes in the face of ubiquitous security risks and the fact that many organizations just can’t find or build the skillsets they need fast enough to meet their needs.

And that’s just where we are right now. Looking ahead, Edwards examined how in just 10 years we have seen major new trends arrive and become established in the mainstream. The 2010s were all about cloud computing – the next decade will see a shift in focus to computing at the edge. In particular, hybrid cloud, public cloud and on-premises technologies will develop further – with on-prem in particular evolving to focus on latency, manageability, compliance, and costs.

“Microdatacenters” at the edge will replace traditional rack volumes at centralized datacenters as the area of explosive growth. While today’s datacenters will retain importance as the place where data is collected, key vertical markets such as government, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and agriculture will drive the creation of these edge datacenters.

Changing roles in changing times
This evolution in IT infrastructure also means that the traditional concept of vendors and channel partners will change. A shortage of technical skills in the channel is shifting customer focus toward pre-integrated solutions rather than piecemeal integration of disparate vendor technologies. This will be accompanied by continued growth in subscription business in the channel.

At the heart of all of this is the technology itself and its ability to support business needs in a distributed future. As Jonathan Healey, from the Office of the CTO of Schneider observed, there are a range of challenges in delivering high availability in a hybrid world. If both public cloud and on-prem need to be online for things to work, then true uptime is the product of the individual uptimes. To illustrate, public cloud uptime of 99.6% multiplied by on-prem uptime of 99.2% yields actual hybrid uptime of 98.8%. By its nature, hybrid is the sum of its parts and organizations will need to invest in technology which minimize pain points across the board to capitalize on this wave of change.

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions like HC3 from Scale Computing are already matching the hybrid cloud and edge computing needs of many organizations. These systems, designed for simplicity, scalability, and high availability are small enough to meet the needs of the microdatacenters and scalable enough to meet the needs of growing business. These on-prem infrastructure solutions have already been evolving alongside the growing needs of present and future hybrid IT.

From our perspective at Scale Computing, looking to the future is a key part of our success. It is inspiring to work with partners and attend events with companies who have the same vision. It also reminds us why we placed the objectives of reducing complexity and controlling costs at the heart of our tech philosophy. We went into business to help deliver on this digital future and organizations should approach it with the confidence that the technology is out there which can balance the need to innovate against the imperatives of managing complexity and cost.

@JeffReady

https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2017/11/small-businesses-have-started-embrace-hci-here-s-why

Interesting read on small business. But is HCI really not already been mainstream for quite some time?

Scale Computing Named Winner of Best Hardware Midmarket Solution at Midmarket CIO Forum

Scale Partnering with WinMagic via The Register

https://www.winmagic.com/

Scale is getting more and more press coverage and we want to be able to share that with everyone, but to keep it from being overwhelming, are creating a thread for collecting the small news items.

Market Biz reports on the state of the integrated hyperconvergence market with Scale leading the pack of vendors in this space.

We are all trying to get the most out of our IT investments, but the IT industry has developed some bad habits when it comes to spending, especially on IT infrastructure. In honor of Halloween, here are 5 terrifying IT habits that can wreak havoc with your datacenter budget.

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1 – Holding on Too Long

Like a sturdy house or a reliable car, it makes sense to hold onto some purchases in life long after they are paid off, but that way of thinking doesn’t compute in IT. Technology changes so quickly that equipment and even software can become a liability more quickly than you can plan for. It can be better to think of technology solutions as perishable rather than durable goods that can go bad even before their expiration dates

It is important to stay abreast of new IT technologies and constantly look at the benefits of adopting emerging solutions. Older solutions will lead to inefficiencies and higher costs compared to competitors who have implemented faster, more efficient systems. IT is not just supposed to be a cost center, but an investment center that drives business forward with better technology. Holding on to older technologies may cost you much more by holding you back than continuing to invest in technologies that will propel you past the competition.

2- Buying only Big Brands

There is something to be said for buying from trusted brands to deliver solid solutions, but IT is also an innovation industry that is fueled by startups and entrepreneurs. The big brands are often nothing more than startups who traded innovation for a focus on profits, leveraging their brand name recognition to raise prices and lock in customers to lengthy contracts and high maintenance and support fees.

These big brands often only innovate by acquiring smaller innovative companies and affixing their name and logo on the packaging along with a higher price tag. Instead just being a consumer to the big brands, you should pay attention to the startups. You’ll get newer, more innovative technologies with startups and better deals because these companies don’t charge you for the brand name, just for the merits of the solution.

3 – Dividing IT into Technology Silos

Maybe somewhere along the line it made some sense to divide IT up based on technology components like storage, servers, networking, virtualization, and disaster recovery to name a few. Unfortunately, this division can prevent IT professionals from seeing the big picture of how these varying components are supposed to work together for the maximum benefit to the business. Without the whole IT department focusing on the whole IT vision, none of the individual technology silos is going to operating efficiently.

Look for opportunities to simplify technologies to avoid over-specialization by IT professionals. The final end-game for IT involves combining all of the varying technologies into solutions that make business more efficient and more profitable. Complexity and isolated silos can make that end-game much harder to achieve and end up costing far too much.

4 – Having Too Many Vendors

As with technology silos, having too many different vendors can over-complicate IT and increase costs. Each vendor represents a different management interface, a different set of documentation, a different contact for support, and different training and certification. Different vendors also means different versions and different maintenance and patch schedules which can cause incompatibilities and instability in the overall solution.

Although it is important to keep your options open for new vendor technologies that can help your business, each component in IT does not have to be from a different vendor. If you can combine some technologies (servers, storage, virtualization, etc) into single vendor solutions, you can simplify training, management, and support in order to lower costs.

5 – Over-Provisioning

For a long-time, vendors have tried to convince us to buy more than we need to plan for future growth. In IT, though, it is very difficult to determine technology needs 3-5 years down the line. Prices and technology change frequently and in 2-3 years, you’ll likely be able to get new and better technologies for less than what you are purchasing now. Over-provisioning now to fulfill your needs 3-5 years from now is likely a bad investment.

Look for solutions that can scale up or scale out easily so you can buy just what you need, when you need it. Make sure that in the future, you can scale with faster and bigger capacity as needed, not just more of the same. You’ll want to be able to take advantage of future technology when it becomes available.

Summary

IT constantly poses new challenges to do more with less. Don’t let bad IT industry habits developed over the last few decades turn your IT department into a horror show. New hyperconverged infrastructure technologies like HC3 from Scale Computing allow you to break these bad IT habits and do more with less, radically simplifying IT. Make the decision to start investing in technology that changes the way we think about and manage IT for a better, more efficient IT future.