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Scale targets edge workloads with HE500 hyper-converged nodes
Scale Computing adds hyper-converged infrastructure nodes to provide edge compute and storage that is fully compatible with its datacentre-scale HCI appliances
Scale Computing has launched a series of hyper-converged appliances aimed at edge computing use cases.
The new HE500 boxes provide compute and storage for virtualised environments in 1U or tower form factor hardware, and are compatible with Scale’s much larger HC1000 and 5000 series appliances, which ramp up to hundreds of terabytes in storage capacity.
The HE500 hyper-converged infrastructure appliances come in five variants. Three are rackable 1U boxes, with all-spinning disk HDDs, hybrid flash and all-flash options. The two tower variants are all-HDD or all flash.
For high-capacity use cases, the HDD models are best suited, as they take drives up to 8TB. SSD capacities supported only go up to 960GB, so would be best suited to performance workloads.
All HE500 models come with 32GB of RAM but can be upgraded to 64GB. Meanwhile, Scale’s HC1000 and 5000s can go to 1TB of RAM.
The new edge-focused products have the same feature set as the larger-capacity products. Projected use cases are in, for example, retail organisations, where local HE500s can run workloads for local sites while being able to replicate or failover to Scale hardware at central datacentres.
Dave Demlow, vice-president of product management for Scale Computing, said the target market is edge computing situations where there are “a large number of sites, with no IT staff and that are looking for ease of use and are autonomic and self-healing”.
Demlow said there are no concrete plans to add NVMe flash, but that it is on the roadmap.
Read more on hyper-converged
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- Penlon replaces HPE servers and storage and VMware virtualisation to escape the high costs of licensing, and deploys Scale Computing hyper-converged appliances at two UK datacentres.
Scale Computing’s hyper-converged products are based on its own KVM-based hypervisor, so do not use the most commonly-seen VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
Hyper-converged infrastructure sees compute and storage put in the same hardware with the ability to connect nodes in grid-like fashion to build clusters. Advantages are ease of deployment and maintenance, so HCI has become popular as an SME play, although capacities can stretch towards petabyte scale.
