This article is more than 1 year old

Scale Computing: Not for enterprise, but that's all part of the plan

Four months of use have made the Scales fall from my eyes

Parting thoughts

I'm now four months into using Scale, three months of having my company's production VMs running on these nodes. There is effort involved with moving from other hypervisors over to KVM, but not nearly so much as the hardcore VMware and Hyper-V fanboys would have you believe.

Scale Computing rail kit label

Rail kit contains link to how to install rail kit. Bloody brilliant

Porting VDI installations over to KVM would be a pain. Heck, Scale doesn't even have much in the way of VDI features. But VDI deployments are almost always separate from server clusters anyways, so it's entirely possible this won't matter, even to the few non-enterprises running VDI.

Scale isn't ready to take on EVO:Rail, Nutanix or SimpliVity directly. The featureset isn't there. But from what I hear, speaking to my network of SMB admins around the world, Scale are doing serious damage to the typical HP/Dell "Servers + array" racket as it has targeted the SMB.

For example, Scale is doing very well here in Canada. We're a nation of SMBs, so that's to be expected. They're also making more headway in Europe than I would have initially thought, and they have been elevated to cult status within the Spiceworks community.

Scale have made a great Toyota. That's fine and good, but can they move upmarket and start selling against the Ferraris or Lamborghinis? And how well will their Datacenter Butler service scale? Is such a high level of service really viable for customers with thousands of nodes, or once Scale have tens of thousands of customers?

Scale aren't fancy, flashy, screaming fast or feature packed. Scale are "good enough" made manifest and affordable to a sizable chunk of the world's billion+ SMBs. Maybe, for now, that's all they really need to be. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like