Simplified Virtualization For Small Business

For IT professionals in small and midsized businesses (SMBs), ensuring application continuity and uptime is anything but a small responsibility. Like businesses of any size, SMBs are faced with tight IT budgets and limited resources, and require an infrastructure that is highly available, scalable, and easy to use. For many small businesses, threats of extensive downtime are very real, especially when viewed against a challenging backdrop of budgetary restrictions and personnel limitations. In many cases, old infrastructures have been nursed along, protected by little more than a single backup tape. Enter Scale Computing’s HC³ - delivering infrastructure as an appliance.

Scale Computing & SMBs

With Scale Computing’s integrated virtualization solution, HC³, SMBs have access to enterprise-class high availability and scalability, and a modern virtualized infrastructure, delivered in an automated, easy to manage appliance cluster at a fraction of the enterprise price tag. Powered by Scale’s ICOS™, all servers, storage, and virtualization capabilities are pooled together to form a single cluster – managed as a single server – and bringing with it turnkey scalability and automated high available for the applications running on HC³.

Benefits of Scale Computing

Scalability – All of the resources of every node in an HC³ cluster are aggregated together into a single pool of resources. This delivers the feel of a single server solution. But this “super server” brings with it significant benefits to your environment. Scalability is on of these benefits. As new resources are required, new nodes can simply and easily be added to an existing cluster without requiring a maintenance window to do so. If more storage capacity is required, simply add storage-heavy nodes to the existing HC³ environment, and the capacity of those nodes is pooled together with the existing cluster. Likewise, if new compute resources are needed for new or expanding virtual machines and applications, compute-heavy nodes can be added to the existing environment, adding new compute power to the existing environment.

Availability – Scale’s patented ICOS technology is continuously monitoring thousands of variable conditions within the HC³ cluster. Should a problem be identified on a node, applications running on that node will automatically be live migrated to other nodes in the cluster. If necessary, the problem node will be removed from the cluster entirely for maintenance. Likewise, even in the event of a complete and sudden power failure on a node, the VMs which were running on the failed node will automatically be rebooted on other nodes in the cluster, bringing your environment back online in automated fashion.

Simplicity – In order to achieve a highly available infrastructure, multiple components are required - each with their own costs, management paradigms, and operating overhead. SANs, external servers, virtualization software, management tools, and complex networking all play a role in creating high availability, but this high availability is achieved at the cost of significant complexity. Attempting to expand and scale such an infrastructure often introduces even more costs and complexity to the environment.

With HC³, all of these disparate systems are collapsed into a single, integrated, easy to use system. As the administrator, HC³ delivers high availability and scalability, with radical simplicity. Instead of a complex network of pieces and tools, HC³ feels like managing a single server solution which runs all of your applications – but this server brings with it scalability and high availability for your applications.

Virtualization
Agile IT
Reducing Costs
High Availability

Virtualization:

Virtualization itself is neither a solution nor a cure for the problems faced in SMB IT. Instead, it is a technology that can be deployed to combat specific problems in an IT environment. For SMBs, virtualization is most often seen as a path toward delivering high-availability for applications.

Unfortunately, the deployment of virtualization comes with three significant costs: infrastructure complexity, capital expense and a resulting operating expense. The bottom line is that virtualization is neither easy nor inexpensive. Virtualization software and hypervisors must be mastered, management tools purchased and learned, servers clustered together and a SAN purchased, deployed and managed. Simply deploying a single new application can involve a headache spanning from SAN provisioning and MPIO management, to hypervisor configuration, specialized storage management, and failover testing on the server side - all in the hopes of achieving high-availability and being able to live migrate an application from one server to another and still have it work correctly. And, that’s just the beginning. If new applications are needed and new resources need to be deployed, extensive reconfigurations may be required, costly new equipment purchased, and dealing with incompatibilities between old and new equipment.

How Scale Computing’s HC³ Eases Virtualization Deployment

Scalability – All of the resources of every node in an HC³ cluster are aggregated together into a single pool of resources. This delivers the feel of a single server solution. But this “super server” brings with it significant benefits to your environment. Scalability is on of these benefits. As new resources are required, new nodes can simply and easily be added to an existing cluster without requiring a maintenance window to do so. If more storage capacity is required, simply add storage-heavy nodes to the existing HC³ environment, and the capacity of those nodes is pooled together with the existing cluster. Likewise, if new compute resources are needed for new or expanding virtual machines and applications, compute-heavy nodes can be added to the existing environment, adding new compute power to the existing environment.

Availability – Scale’s patented ICOS technology is continuously monitoring thousands of variable conditions within the HC³cluster. Should a problem be identified on a node, applications running on that node will automatically be live migrated to other nodes in the cluster. If necessary, the problem node will be removed from the cluster entirely for maintenance. Likewise, even in the event of a complete and sudden power failure on a node, the VMs which were running on the failed node will automatically be rebooted on other nodes in the cluster, bringing your environment back online in automated fashion.

Simplicity – In order to achieve a highly available infrastructure, multiple components are required - each with their own costs, management paradigms, and operating overhead. SANs, external servers, virtualization software, management tools, and complex networking all play a role in creating high availability, but this high availability is achieved at the cost of significant complexity. Attempting to expand and scale such an infrastructure often introduces even more costs and complexity to the environment.

With HC³, all of these disparate systems are collapsed into a single, integrated, easy to use system. As the administrator, HC³delivers high availability and scalability, with radical simplicity. Instead of a complex network of pieces and tools, HC³ feels like managing a single server solution which runs all of your applications – but this server brings with it scalability and high availability for your applications.

Agile IT:

Today’s IT department is often overworked, stretched thin and operating on a shoestring budget. This means that IT agility is not just an option, it’s a way of life.

Businesses are tied to their critical applications and when these applications go down, the ramifications on the business are significant. High availability is a must-have for all businesses. Virtualization platforms provide a piece of the puzzle toward achieving this goal.

But SMB IT groups must work within the reality of constrained budgets and limited staffing common to the SMB. Increasing operational costs is seldom an option. Due to the complexity of a virtualized infrastructure, implementing a new system often involves extensive consulting and the ongoing services of server, networking, storage and virtualization specialists. Maintaining the resulting system requires significant and consistent training, ongoing licensing fees, new management tools and expensive components.

A Simplified Virtualization Platform

In order to achieve a highly available infrastructure, multiple components are required, each with their own costs, management paradigms, and operating overhead. Creating new complexity and cost in the quest for high availability is not a desirable exchange. At Scale Computing, we seek to deliver products that provide a better, simpler, more elegant way to deliver high availability for IT environments.

With HC³, gone are the days of managing external servers, storage subsystems, virtualization software stacks and clustering. Instead, all of these disparate systems are collapsed into a single, integrated, easy to use system.

As the administrator, HC³ delivers high availability and scalability, with radical simplicity. Instead of a complex network of pieces and tools, HC³ feels like managing a single server solution which runs all of your applications – but this server brings with it scalability and high availability for your applications.

Reducing Costs:

When implementing a virtualization infrastructure there are many factors to consider. This includes everything from platform agility and server sizing, to storage requirements and network overhead. But for small to midsized companies, one of the most important concerns is the short and long-term cost of the solution.

The reality is that most IT departments have limited staff and limited budgets, mismatched with an endless list of projects. Even with these limitations, the IT department is expected to deliver applications in a highly available and affordable way. At Scale Computing, we built HC³ with these challenges in mind.

Cutting Costs with a Simplified Infrastructure

Often, the ongoing costs associated with a new infrastructure aren’t obvious. The upfront costs of servers, storage and software licensing may be known, but what features will need to be licensed later? What is the true cost of expanding? Will existing systems need to be replaced when expansion happens? Will virtualization licensing requirements move to a new, more expensive tier because of hardware growth?

No Servers to Buy, No SAN to Manage

HC³ eliminates the need to purchase external servers and shared storage for virtualization. Instead, the power of our Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS) means the HC³ cluster pools storage and compute resources together in a highly available environment. If new resources are needed, new HC³ nodes can easily be added to an existing cluster and these new resources will be pooled together with the old – no need to reconfigure and no need to start over with an entirely new system.

No Hypervisor Licenses to Purchase

Rather than purchase virtualization software – often full of features and scalability limitations which can only be unlocked with yet more license fees –HC³ integrates and automates the hypervisor capabilities into the product itself. There are no hypervisor license fees required by HC³. Simply owning an HC³ cluster means you have access to a scalable, highly available, virtualized environment without any hidden software fees.

High Availability Infrastructures for Your Business:

When adopting a new environment, IT departments must design this environment with high availability in mind. Extensive periods of downtime in the event of equipment failure can cripple a business.

At Scale Computing, we’ve specifically developed HC³ with high availability in mind. Powered by our Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS), we monitor 1,500 different variables and conditions on every node in the HC³ cluster, continuously monitoring system health and service uptime. Combined with our scale-out architecture, new resources can be added and new applications can be easily deployed in a highly available environment.

Scale Computing’s HC³ High Availability

HC³ nodes powered by ICOS form an integrated pool of server, storage and virtualization resources. In the event of a failure, the virtual machines that contain your applications are automatically moved to other nodes in the cluster. Data that existed on the failed node has active, mirrored copies that already exist elsewhere in the cluster. Data integrity is maintained as applications are moved to other nodes in the cluster – all completed in an automated fashion to minimize downtime, and without the need for special configurations or external shared storage requirements.