Scale Computing: Fleet Manager Cloud-Based Management Solution for Edge Computing

Scale Computing, Inc. announced Fleet Manager for edge computing and MSPs, which makes managing and monitoring the health of distributed IT infrastructure easier.

Available as part of the SC//Platform, SC//Fleet Manager consolidates real-time conditions for a fleet of clusters, including storage and compute resources, allowing IT leaders to identify areas of concern using a single pane of glass, scaling from 1 to over 50,000 clusters.

“Delhaize needed to rapidly deploy resilient in-store infrastructure to support existing workloads as well as new data and processing-intensive initiatives such as cashier-less checkout and customer safety and security measures. SC//Platform and SC//Fleet Manager allowed us to efficiently manage the clusters in hundreds of stores to ensure our edge computing applications remain highly available, saving us time and money,” said Rolf Vanden Eynde, manager, network, strategic infrastructure, Ahold-Delhaize.

Instead of managing individual deployments, SC//Fleet Manager gives users the ability to see and manage their entire fleet at once from an intuitive cloud-based console at fleet.scalecomputing.com. Connectivity and cluster health can be checked with a quick glance. Any problems across the fleet are highlighted automatically, and if there is an issue, IT administrators can easily drill down into a specific cluster to further diagnose and fix the problem. For IT managers with multiple clusters, the company‘s low maintenance time will be further reduced by 50% or more.

“The emergence of cloud computing significantly accelerated the digitization of business. It gave us better availability and scalability without the burden of managing infrastructure. However, not all applications can or should run from the cloud. Latency and bandwidth limitations force us to run them where they are physically used for better, more reliable performance. These challenges reveal the need for a new class of computing. The promise of edge computing is to bring applications closer to the people and things interacting with them without sacrificing cloud-like ease of use, scalability, and high availability,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder. “We have been delivering on the edge computing promise, allowing customers to successfully deploy applications wherever they are needed. The new fleet management technology we are introducing as part of SC//Platform removes barriers for easy management and application high availability, for over 50,000 clusters,” Ready explained.

Also announced today as part of the SC//Platform software update are improvements in SC//HyperCore software, the foundation of SC//Platform. SC//HyperCore bundles a variety of adapted open source and proprietary, software to create a simplified operating system for the company’s clusters. Custom-built utilizing the KVM architecture to integrate with the SC Reliable Independent Block Engine (SCRIBE) storage layer directly, SC//HyperCore makes virtualization and software automation look easy. The firm’s patented HyperCore technology identifies, reduces, and corrects problems in real time.

“Our customers tell us they cannot be successful with edge computing without the best fleet management. We are proud to be the first to solve this problem for customers deploying applications at the edge,” said Scott Loughmiller, CPO and co-founder. “If you are deploying applications outside of centralized data centers, at the edge of your network closest to where that data is created and utilized, we can help you manage hundreds or thousands of distributed edge infrastructure deployments with few or no on-site IT personnel.”

Included in SC//HyperCore are REST-APIs that enhance the speed and ease with which users can deploy VMs and containers at scale using cloud-init. Cloud-init, a powerful open-source technology that allows customers to take common VM templates and provide them with their unique configuration information at first boot via scripting, allows for easy, mass provisioning of customized VMs. IT administrators no longer need to manually create and individually customize VMs, but can programmatically provide hundreds or thousands of machines with their own settings via script. This combined with SC//Fleet Manager provides organizations with the ability to orchestrate and automate the deployment of applications across their distributed edge computing fleet to ensure consistency in change control and across sites.

In addition, company announces further SC//Platform news:

• Rolling upgrades of SC//Hypercore software clusters administered centrally from SC//Fleet Manager with a single click.

• SC//HyperCore allows users to scale the number of workloads managed from one to thousands, using the same software and interface on different sized hardware. This ‘mix and match’ capability is unique to the industry.

• Mix and Match Nodes: Hardware appliances of different sizes can be added to and coexist in the same cluster and contribute to the cluster storage pool. Even appliances with dissimilar storage such as all HDD, hybrid HDD + SSD, or all SSD can be combined together as a cluster grows. This allows clusters to grow not just linearly but in whatever way is needed or desired for application workloads. This support for different size cluster nodes can facilitate non-disruptive upgrades to the infrastructure by adding newer, bigger nodes and then retiring or repurposing older small nodes if desired, all while keeping the VMs running.

• Simple interface design of SC//HyperCore allows both storage and compute resource management and VM management from a single UI. Resource statistics are displayed in real-time, both per VM and cluster-wide.

• SC//HyperCore’s UI provides insights into 5 core sections: the Heads Up Display (HUD), the system display panel, the VM management panel, the control center panel, and storage details.

• SC//HyperCore allows for programmatic deployment of containers with lower management effort

  • Docker containers running on SC//HyperCore

• Docker and other OCI runtimes can be deployed within a VM to run container(s)

• Full API driven infrastructure as code (IaaC) is possible

• Kubernetes (K8S) clusters running on SC//HyperCore

• Multi-node or single node K8s can be deployed within a VM

• Storage persistence is provided at an infrastructure level or optional 3rd-party container native storage

• Integrations are available with a range of optional Container Management Systems:

• IBM Edge Application Manager

• Google Anthos

• Azure ARC for Kubernetes

• SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Cluster management platform

• Red Hat Openshift Cloud

• AWS IoT Greengrass

• Avassa Control Tower

• Portainer Container management

• Balena cloud

• Company’s services is offering a new service, the Edge Deployment Service, designed to provide a remote installation by a firm’s representative.

SC//Fleet Manager is priced based on the number of clusters under management.