INDIANAPOLIS – December 10, 2020 – Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions, announced today it has raised $30 million in funding, led by Elevate Ventures and with participation from existing investors.

Scale Computing will use the new funding to continue to build the company, expanding sales, delivery, and R&D. Having grown annual software 150% since its last funding, Scale Computing will continue expanding the capabilities of its edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions to meet increased market demand.

As increasingly distributed computing and remote work become long term realities, organizations continue to upgrade their legacy infrastructure and adopt Scale Computing’s data center and edge computing solutions to obtain maximum availability, ease of use, and reliability. Scale Computing delivered record software revenue in each of the first three quarters of 2020 (ending September 30th), achieving a growth rate of 65% year-over-year.

“Scale Computing has been helping organizations with our self-healing, autonomously managed IT infrastructure since our inception. In no area is our technology more important today than in edge computing, where the costs of downtime and management grow exponentially,” said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing. “We have met the challenges of this new and fast growing market, and this is driving significant growth as more and more enterprises discover the tremendous cost savings the Scale Computing platform brings to the edge. Today is another milestone for our customers, partners, and employees, to whom we owe our tremendous growth. We are proud to have the support of our new investors, alongside our returning backers, as we continue to expand our reach into new verticals and geographies.”

“Many customers have told us how much time and money Scale Computing has saved them, enabling them to deliver the right IT infrastructure for their business, even in the most unusual of locations,” said Ting Gootee, chief investment officer at Elevate Ventures. “The Scale Computing platform allows organizations to quickly adopt edge and hyperconverged infrastructure so that anyone can get up and running in a matter of minutes. We are thrilled to help the company accelerate that growth with this next round of funding.”

Scale Computing’s solutions enable applications to achieve maximum uptime even when local IT resources and staff are scarce, making them ideal applications platforms for core data center to edge computing use cases for retail, industrial, transportation, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, education, remote office/back office, and mobile platforms.

Indianapolis, December 7, 2020 – Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, announces that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, is recognizing the industry’s smallest and most powerful edge computing appliance, the HE150, powered by Scale Computing’s HC3 Edge software platform, as a winner in the 2020 Product of the Year Awards in the Internet of Things category. The HE150 was also recently announced as the winner in the EDGE INFRASTRUCTURE category for CRN’s 2020 Tech Innovator Award.

For the fifth year of the respected CRN Product of the Year list, products were chosen by surveying solution providers who have real-life experience with the products and technologies, and the expertise of the CRN editorial team. Products and services featured on this list exemplify the IT channel’s top offerings based on technological innovation, financial opportunity and customer demand.

The HE150 appliance, which also won the Customer Demand and Technology subcategories, combines Scale Computing’s self-healing platform for autonomously running applications at the edge, with a small, all-flash, NVMe storage-based compute appliance that delivers all of the simplicity, efficiency, and enterprise-ready virtualization associated with Scale Computing’s HC3 platform. Built specifically for sites that need highly available infrastructure, the HE150 can be deployed almost anywhere, without requiring a rack or server closet. While taking up only the space needed to stack three smartphones, it provides a fully functional, integrated platform for running applications that includes high availability clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.

“The edge requires a combination of enterprise-grade application reliability, autonomous management and self healing due to the limited IT resources available at the edge, and a form factor that makes sense for the environment. This is a tricky combination, but we have delivered it with the award winning HE150,” commented Scott Loughmiller, Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Scale Computing. “As technology pushes its way into every part of business, the need for edge computing to support an application-driven world is expanding. The HE150 runs applications at maximum uptime where it was not feasible to before due to location and lack of IT resources; use cases include retail, grocery, educational facilities, local government offices, medical offices, ocean going vessels, and manufacturing shop floors – the possibilities are endless.”

The top five finalists are chosen by CRN® editors in each of 24 different product categories. Products are then rated by solution providers using criteria such as Technology (product quality and reliability; richness of product features/functionality; technical innovation; compatibility and ease of integration), Revenue and Profit (demonstrated ability to drive new revenue; resulting profit margins; demonstrated ability to attach services revenue), and Customer Demand (demonstrated ability to meet a market or customer demand; demonstrated ability to create new customer relationships or improve existing ones). This year’s survey received more than 5,000 responses.

“The companies being recognized in CRN’s 2020 Products of the Year Awards set the bar high with innovative solutions that address the constantly evolving demands of the IT market,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “This list offers shining examples of industry excellence for channel partners and we commend those who made it this year.”

The 2020 CRN® Products of the Year will be featured in the December issue of CRN® Magazine and published online at www.crn.com/poty.

INDIANAPOLIS – November 10, 2020 – Scale Computing, a market leader in edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged solutions, has introduced new HC3 infrastructure appliances that deliver the extra processing power of Nvidia GPUs. For power-users on virtual desktops or computing-intensive applications for design or analytics, the HC1250DFG and HC5250DFG appliances engage high-performance GPUs to provide increased speed and processing efficiency. Scale Computing is the only technology provider delivering high performance applications from the data center to the edge on the same software platform and interface.

As remote work becomes a long term reality, organizations continue to execute on getting systems in place to support all remote users, whether they leverage applications in the cloud or work with very high performance applications that require dedicated GPU and high frame buffer requirements for remote users hosted on premises. These HC3 hyperconverged appliances are designed to enhance support for performance-intensive use cases such as high density Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, 3D Imaging/Modeling, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and GIS. With flexible deployment options from one appliance to clusters of multiple appliances, these appliances provide a highly-available, high-performance, hyperconverged virtualization platform.

The new HC3 infrastructure appliances delivering the superior processing power from Nvidia GPUs join other recently introduced HCI appliances designed to meet the needs for performance computing for both the enterprise and the SMB and from the core data center to the edge.

• The HC3250DF stands out from other HCI solutions designed for performance computing with its ease of use, and brings a high amount of speed, density, throughput, and power to enable VDI for many more users per node while keeping future growth in focus. Unlike more complex infrastructure solutions that try to emulate classic SAN storage infrastructure, the Scale Computing HC3250DF is easier to deploy, manage, scale out, and its NVMe storage architecture requires no manual configuration and consumes less system RAM, resulting in more RAM being available to virtual machines and their applications.

• The HE150 appliance is a small, all-flash, NVMe storage-based compute appliance that delivers all of the simplicity, efficiency, and enterprise-ready virtualization associated with Scale Computing’s HC3 platform. Built specifically for sites that need highly available infrastructure, the HE150 can be deployed almost anywhere, without requiring a rack or server closet. Taking up only the space needed to stack three smartphones, it also includes high availability clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.

“Enterprise and SMB customers have a need for performance-intensive use cases, both in their data centers and at the edge,” commented Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “Scale Computing customers now don’t have to choose different platforms to manage their data center and edge computing needs, either for on site or remote workers The HC3 platform is able to handle any application needs necessary.”

All Scale Computing HC3 appliances feature intelligent automation for self-healing and high availability to keep clusters running through component and appliance failures, as well as integrated disaster recovery capabilities to protect data and workloads to remote sites for fast failover and recovery. These capabilities enable applications to achieve maximum uptime even when local IT resources and staff are scarce, making the HC1250DFG and HC5250DFG appliances ideal application platforms for core data center to edge computing use cases for retail, industrial, transportation, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, education, remote office/back office, and mobile platforms.

Edge computing deployments have unique constraints that are significantly different from the ones with which typical data center deployments contend. After all, by definition, edge deployments are away from normal support services, far from the sanitized data center, and deeply enmeshed in the real work of the organization where they must deliver high value without disrupting other business activities.

So, organizations pursuing edge deployments should step back and carefully consider all the different factors that must be weighed for edge computing and then look for a solution that addresses the most crucial. Let’s take a look at four of the most crucial.

Tip 1: Keep the Footprint Small

It might seem an obvious point, but many products sold as “edge” equipment are not actually designed for that purpose—they’re simply marketed for that role or, at best, minimally adapted for edge requirements.

Because some vendors just sell standard data center equipment for edge use without accounting for the less-than-perfect environment that may be encountered there, edge installations are acquiring a reputation for being unexpectedly troublesome.

That’s why it’s vital that edge equipment should be conceived from the start for that purpose, with sufficient ruggedness built in to handle the wider range of issues that are typical at the edge, whether that edge is the shop floor, a warehouse, or somewhere in a retail establishment.

Edge components and systems need to be thought of as “universal” products that can be deployed when and where needed, with few limitations, and made appropriately secure in any given environment.

Tip 2: Autonomous and Resilient

Edge computing is no place for daintiness: It’s where real work gets done, some of it dirty, messy, hot, and noisy. So, in addition to needing only a basic physical environment and simple power and connectivity, prudent adopters make sure the edge setup (hardware and software) is designed to be failure resistant, able to recover from many problems autonomously, to protect data, and to maintain operations in almost any circumstance.

What does that look like in practice? As much as possible, physical interventions onsite need to be avoided—no buttons that say “press here” to restart something. Instead, everything should be callable and able to respond when power is made available. Furthermore, autonomy should be part of the basics, delivering no-nonsense reboots and allowing most other maintenance tasks to be initiated remotely.

Tip 3: Easily Scalable and Expandable

Edge environments are dynamic, with new applications being deployed regularly and data volumes growing exponentially, creating new demands on edge infrastructure. It’s critical that this infrastructure is designed to accommodate that growth and expand and upgrade the edge micro-data center with new resources and applications as easily as the initial edge deployment.

Failure to plan for expansion of the edge environment can lead to expensive forklift upgrades or multiple independent islands of infrastructure to manage, with all the complexity and cost associated with that kind of choice.

Tip 4: Standardized and Simple To Manage

For all but the smallest of organizations, this is perhaps the most important consideration because edge may involve multiplying sites and types of equipment on the network.

If approached haphazardly, without a plan, edge can quickly spawn hard-to-manage complexity that can strain IT staff and have company-wide implications. To keep from becoming a nightmare, edge systems should take a standardized approach requiring little or no customization and minimal skills in installation.

To that end, edge should embrace infrastructure as code (IaC), which simplifies change control.

Repeatability means that service and support is standardized so staff doesn’t need to research each installation before responding to a problem; instead, use a consistent approach and methodology. It’s a model for efficiency used across every other domain, from manufacturing to medicine, but too often ignored in edge deployments.

Similarly, management must not require specialized IT staff on site; upgrades and infrastructure scaling must be non-disruptive; the foundation must be self-healing; and IT specialists must be able to manage the entire edge fleet seamlessly at scale.

Finally, look for zero-touch provisioning. This is a device-configuration process that can be operated automatically and eliminates most of the burden on IT administrators when setting up, maintaining, or upgrading an edge system.

If you’re interested in learning more about our Edge Computing solutions can transform your IT infrastructure, start your free trial today!