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Scale Computing is a developer and manufacturer of unified, scale-out storage solutions tailored to the virtualisation and archiving needs of the small and medium-sized business (SMB). The entire Scale portfolio is based on its uniquely flexible Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS™) technology that offers full-functioning, advanced storage features at a fraction of the price of comparable solutions. ICOS™ combines powerful features with intelligence that makes storage easy-to-manage, even for novices.
Scale’s ICOS technology has won dozens of awards including the DCS Virtualisation Project of the Year 2011. In 2009, Forbes named Scale Computing one of America's Most Promising Companies. Currently, Scale is a finalist in the Technology Excellence section of the UK IT Awards for Infrastructure Innovator of the Year, which will be announced on 9 November 2011.
Headquartered in the USA with a London office (opened in 2010) and presence in APAC, Scale Computing offers its products exclusively through channel partners.
For more information please visit our website at www.scalecomputing.co.uk or email info@scalecomputing.com.
Contact information
Address
Scale Computing
Aston Court
Kingsmead Business Park
HP11 1LA
UK
Telephone: 0149 461 6118
Email: info@scalecomputing.com
Website: www.scalecomputing.co.uk
Press Releases
Liberte Ousts HP LeftHand, Selects Scale Computing’s Intelligent Storage Solution to Complete Virtualisation Project
Scale Computing and GEO Foundation partnership wins Storage Virtualisation Project of the Year at the DCS Awards
Scale Computing Lands $17.0 Million in Series C Funding
Scale Computing Reports 102% Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth in the SME
Scale Computing Reports 258% Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth for First Fiscal Quarter 2011
Case Studies
Central & Cecil
Case Study: VirtualisationEMEA_Central&Cecil_CaseStudy_UK.pdf 257.14 kB
City of London
Case Study: ArchivingEmea_A4_City_of London_CaseStudy_Final.pdf 585.00 kB
Clabber Girl
Case Study: ManufacturingClabber_Girl_CaseStudy.pdf 212.70 kB
Oroville Hospital
Case Study: HealthcareOroville_Case_Study-T2-Q310-1.pdf 367.35 kB
Stoke Park School & Community Technology College
Case Study: EducationFast Facts
Stoke Park School & Community Technology College is a mixed comprehensive inner city and multicultural school providing education primarily for students between the ages of 11 and 18. Stoke Park School found itself with an ageing IT infrastructure that was unable to meet the required 24/7 environments and flexible learning platforms. To help manage these data hungry applications and growing requirements, Stoke Park School selected Scale Computing’s S-Series S1 Starter Cluster for flexible, scalable storage.
Stoke Park School recently received its ICT Mark, a nationally accredited scheme recognising technology excellence in UK educational institutions. This was achieved through a high quality strategy, including a storage solution that not only improved system performance and reduced costs. This planned approach, supported by dedicated systematic implementation from engaged staff ensured that ICT was delivered to all users.
- Providing education for 1000+ students
- Initial 6TB scale-out storage cluster with 6TB of useable capacity and expandability options
- 2TB additional node planned for improved performance
- Snapshot/replication
- Full mirror/stripe data protection
“Due to the simplicity, scalability and cost savings achieved across our entire school, we are already looking to expand and accelerate our virtualised infrastructure as part of our wider ICT programme.”
David Wells, ICT network manager, Stoke Park School & Community Technology College
Introduction
Stoke Park School & Community Technology College in Coventry is a mixed comprehensive inner city and multicultural college providing education primarily for students between the ages of 11and 18. It is one of the most oversubscribed schools in the city with over 1,000 pupils each year. Its infrastructure includes over 500 computers and 16 virtual servers that manage the school’s computing workload.
The school prides itself on being a community hub, increasingly running 24/7 environments for academic and residential purposes. The growing computing workload now features a collaborative and flexible learning environment to accommodate a large community programme for adults, which includes basic foreign language teaching and a variety of NVQ classes such as Health and Social Care and Child Development.
Challenge
The increasing student numbers and wider course options raised significant storage challenges for Stoke Park School. This was made more acute by the proliferation of media and design courses that require ever-increasing functionality and increasingly larger and higher quality files, such as multimedia content, to be stored. The school worked with Michael Turner, education account manager, Genisys Group, an enterprise IT solutions company, to update the existing IT infrastructure.
The school needed to meet its increasing storage demands and bring the system into a 21st century virtualised and flexible environment. The first step was to evaluate the cost savings and production efficiencies that could be made from migrating to a virtual infrastructure. This ‘right sizing’ of the project was of primary importance given that the UK education sector is facing continual pressure to fulfil increasing attainment targets against a backdrop of unprecedented budget constraints and reduced resources.
Solution
Stoke Park School’s ICT team evaluated Scale Computing’s Intelligent Clustered Operating SystemTM (ICOS) portfolio against key parameters of efficiency savings, value for money, flexibility and scalability. The school purchased a S1 6TB Starter Cluster with one additional 2TB node. This provided the scope and expandability required in order to align storage growth with operational requirements. Scale’s Starter Cluster had the advantage over competitor offerings of scalability. The school’s ICT department only needed to purchase additional nodes when necessary, ensuring a manageable infrastructure and increasing the longevity of the system servers for years to come.
“What made Scale Computing stand out from other providers is its scalability and opportunity to purchase additional nodes alongside improved performance.”
David Wells, ICT network manager, Stoke Park School & Community Technology College
The Starter Cluster was part of the migration of Stoke Park School’s physical servers to a VMWare virtual environment. The migration to a virtual infrastructure was deployed and completed in two weeks.
“We were very impressed by the level of support that we have received from the Scale Computing team, including a webinar demonstrating the technology and consultations with existing customers, which firmly established the benefits of Scale Computing’s portfolio by allowing us to budget our storage growth effectively.”
David Wells, ICT network manager, Stoke Park School & Community Technology College
With Scale Computing’s storage solution in place, Stoke Park School is looking to extend the project to implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure, allowing both staff and students to use their personal and home devices to gain access to the school systems remotely and have access to all the data and information outside of school hours.
Benefits
Scale Computing’s S-Series offers a scalable and highly accessible storage platform. This enables both staff and students to run innovative learning modules and interactive applications in a more flexible and reliable IT environment. Stoke Park School knows it has high performance ICT to support its diversity of courses. As many school and community computing environments require remote access, it is increasingly important for students and residents to have all data readily available.
“We have already started seeing the benefits of having a more secure and stable ICT infrastructure. The cost savings we have made from the S-Series has enabled us to upgrade the PCs in the Design Technology department. We are looking forward to further investing in our future ICT program and enhance the learning experience of our students and residents.”
David Wells, ICT network manager, Stoke Park School & Community Technology College
The flexible ICT platform has helped the school to raise its performance bar. Stoke Park School has received its ICT Mark, a nationally accredited scheme recognising ICT excellence in educational institutions. The school was assessed in a variety of areas ranging from school improvement, pupil attainment, and ICT systems. It successfully demonstrated how Scale Computing’s storage solutions enabled them to virtualise its infrastructure and allow the school to make cost savings that were then reinvested into curriculum development.
Whitepapers
Cost Benefits of Server Virtualisation
This paper reviews the necessary synergies and explores the case for combining virtualisation strategies with next generation, clustered storage solutions.WhitePaper_Virtualization_Cost-WP2-Q310-2.pdf 520.87 kB
ICOS Theory of Operation
A description of the technology, concepts and operating theory behind the Scale Computing’s ICOS technology.Scale_ICOS_Theory_EMEA.pdf 2.82 MB
Virtual Desktop Deployment Solutions Guide
This paper reviews the necessary synergies and explores the case for combining virtualisation strategies with next generation, clustered storage solutions.Scale_VMware_Virtualization_V1_Q410_2.pdf 1.39 MB
Products
Product Information
Product OverviewScale’s ICOS (Intelligent Clustered Operating System TM) is the next step in the evolution of unified storage. Because Scale’s ICOS is a clustered rather than controller-based architecture, clusters contain a minimum of three nodes that provide redundancy and data protection in the rare event of a drive or node failure. Scale’s entire suite of storage products is designed to reduce your costs, increase control and make storage more convenient to manage.
All of Scale’s products offer the following features:
Technical Highlights
Data Protection: All data is mirrored and striped across the nodes in the cluster
High Availability: All data is mirrored on at least 2 nodes. This provides continuous uptime if a drive, network port, power supply or even an entire node stops working
Scalability: Grow your storage in increments from 1 TB to 8 TB raw capacity
Compatibility: Nodes of different sizes can all participate in the same cluster and be used at full capacity. (Limitation: 1 node cannot be bigger than 50% of the total cluster capacity)
Storage Area Network Support
SAN Protocols: iSCSI
Max LUNs: 255
Hosts Supported: Any standards-compliant iSCSI Initiator (VMware, Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Security: IP based access control, CHAP Authentication
High Availability: Virtual IP failover
Network Attached Storage Support
NAS Protocols: NFS, CIFS
SECURITY / NFS: IP/Host based access control
SECURITY / CIFS: ADS Authentication (Kerberos)
SECURITY / High Availability: Virtual IP Addresses are used to serve NAS protocols. In the case of a node/Ethernet failure another node will pick up the down IP and continue communication with the client without losing connectivity
Snapshots
System Snapshots: True copy-on-write snapshots – low overhead, snapshots store only changed data. Flexible snapshot and replication allocation – no need for dedicated snapshot volumes or reserved space
Recovery: Any LUN/Share from any historical snapshot can be restored as a working copy
Replication
Efficiency: Copies changes at a block-level (minimizing time and bandwidth)
Consistency: Copies point in time snapshots to target cluster
Recovery: Any LUN/Share from any available historical snapshot can be restored on the target cluster as a working copy
Granular Replication: Pick and choose what LUNs and shares to schedule for replication
Scheduling: Replication can be scheduled in 15 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 2 hour, 4 hour, 6 hour, 8 hour, 12 hour or daily intervals
Multi-site: Replication can be scheduled to or from up to 5 other clusters simultaneously
Management Interface: Serial Console and web browser-based Administrative GUI over https
Notification Methods: Email, Syslog, Web Administrative GUI
Remote Support: Administrator controlled access to the cluster by Scale Support via SSH
Upgrades: Upgrades are secure and using the Maintenance tab, you can see at a glance what the latest update is
S-Series
Our most flexible product line offers multiple storage node capacities. If you are looking to maximize storage capacity at the lowest price, use the highest capacity starter cluster that meets your needs and add expansion storage nodes now or later to meet your capacity needs and growth.
| Product | RAW Capacity |
| S1 Starter Cluster | 6 TB |
| S1 Expansion Storage Nodes | 2 TB |
| S2 Starter Cluster | 12 TB |
| S2 Expansion Storage Nodes | 4 TB |
| S4 Starter Cluster | 24 TB |
| S4 Expansion Storage Nodes | 8 TB |
M-Series
Our highest performance product line offers multiple storage node capacities, drive technologies and cache options. All offer data centre class power and network redundancy.
Product Raw Capacity
M1 Starter Cluster 6 TB
M1 Expansion Storage Nodes 2 TB
M2 Starter Cluster 12 TB
M2 Expansion Storage Nodes 4 TB
M4 Starter Cluster 24 TB
M4 Expansion Storage Nodes 8 TB
M09x Starter Cluster 5.4 TB (SAS)
M09x Expansion Storage Nodes 1.8 TB (SAS)
M12x Starter Cluster 7.2 TB (SAS)
M12x Expansion Storage Nodes 2.4 TB (SAS)
R1 Starter Cluster 6 TB
R1 Expansion Storage Nodes 2 TB
R2 Starter Cluster 12 TB
R2 Expansion Storage Nodes 4 TB
R4 Starter Cluster 24 TB
R4 Expansion Storage Nodes 8 TB
