Scale Computing’s First UK Customer With Reseller Kisdata

Scale Computing makes its third-generation storage solutions available in the UK and Europe.
 
Scale’s first UK customer is the City of London, the local government
services provider for London’s ‘Square Mile’. Scale, working with
reseller partner Kisdata Ltd, is providing a 12TB (usable storage space) StarterCluster to store City of London’s growing photographic library at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA).

 
Jeff Ready, CEO and founder of Scale Computing, comments: "Scale
Computing has been widely embraced by SMEs across the globe that are
trying to grow storage capacity while cutting costs, increase
scalability control and make storage more convenient to manage. Building
on our success in the US and Japan, we are confident our storage
solutions will be quickly adopted in the UK and European market as it
faces many of the same challenges."
 
Scale, developer and manufacturer of complete mid-market intelligent
clustered storage solutions (ICS), is launching in Europe to tackle the
rising SME storage demand across the region. The company’s flexible
storage portfolio gives SMEs secure, easy-to-manage and affordable
storage solutions, delivering a performance level which would previously
have only been available to larger corporations with bigger IT budgets.
 
As opposed to scale up storage, Scale’s storage solutions are scale out –
the third generation of storage, which enables organisations to buy
storage as they need it, and add capacity as they grow.  As noted by
Gartner, "Scale-out and virtual storage area network architectures
promise lower storage total cost of ownership by reducing acquisition
costs and extending these systems’ service lives via server
virtualisation technologies, self- or third-party maintenance and
changes in asset management," says Stanley Zaffos, vice president and research director, Gartner.
 
Channel Commitment
Scale launches in the UK through a 100 per cent channel model with a growing number of resellers including Fortuna Power Systems,
complete data storage solutions, and Kisdata Ltd an information
management solutions company. Scale has no direct sales force and relies
entirely on its channel partners for sales. This is in stark contrast
to many other companies, which also have a direct sales model that is
rife with channel conflict.
 
"I joined Scale to head up its EMEA operations because of its great technology and commitment to its channel partners," says Bjarne Poulsen, general manager of EMEA for Scale Computing. "Too
many other companies court channel partners only to steal their deals,
which creates bad relationships. With Scale, it’s 100 per cent through
the channel so I can build upon my existing network of resellers by
offering them a solid technology and vendor partnership." Poulsen brings more than 20 years of technology sales experience to Scale.
 
History
Launching in the US in 2007, Scale has quickly become a storage
powerhouse by combining enterprise-level performance, ease-of-management
and commodity hardware. The result is affordable, flexible and robust
storage with a low total cost of ownership. Scale is launching in the UK
and Europe with a globally tested product and business model, and
established relationships with key related technology companies such as
Citrix, IBM and VMware.
 
"SMEs are increasingly reliant on technology as a source of
competitive advantage and there is a growing need for storage solutions
that reduce costs, increase control and make managing storage more
convenient to control the information flow," continues Poulsen. "However,
for too long the market leaders have charged inflated prices and
expensive service options, so our market offering now reduces the entry
point for companies who require high availability storage without the
price tag. I am extremely excited to be bringing this proposition to
Europe."
 
Storage Products
Scale offers a wide-range of scale out (rather than scale up) storage
solutions. Beginning with its ‘JBOD Killer,’ (Just a Box of Disks) the
0.5TB N05 storage node and rising to 12TB performance clusters with high
availability options, Scale’s storage products are all completely
interchangeable and can be purchased as required to grow storage
capacity and performance. Each node, regardless of its density has the
same patent-pending Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology,
making it possible for a company to stick with one system, for life.
 
Unified
A unique feature of Scale’s storage node products is that they are the
only enterprise-class product in their price range to offer a unified,
protocol agnostic block and file-level system. Scale accomplished this
by creating its own Protocol Abstraction Layer (PAL) technology that
makes it possible to add protocols to the cluster anytime in the future
without changing the hardware.
 
Cost Savings
Ideal for first time SAN buyers and organizations looking to virtualize,
Scale Computing’s N05 storage node starts at £5,750 per a 3 node
Starter Cluster. A cluster of 24 TBs of raw, unified storage is £16,098.
This is around 50 to 70 percent less than controller-based solutions
offered by other storage vendors. Additional cost savings are achieved
when companies need to increase capacity. Because Scale’s storage nodes
can be added when needed, companies no longer need to purchase capacity
ahead of its utilization.