Scale – Life at the edge

Whether edge to you is a shop, ship, manufacturing plant, remote/branch/small office, oil rig, hotel or anywhere else – you need to have a small compute presence. If you are holding 70% of your corporate data there, it needs to be secure, resilient and easy to manage.

London, August 2022 – Gartner and others are suggesting that within the next 3 years, 70% of data will be generated and processed at the ‘Edge’. Even if we think that this is an over statement and it doesn’t affect you, at half this rate it’s not only significant but faster than the move to cloud was in the same timeframe. While we could spend a day just debating what ‘Edge’ is, lets just agree the basics. It’s outside of our Datacentre, which ironically suggests that in 5 years’ time the data left in the place that we have spent the last 20 years protecting will only be 20-30% of our total data.

Whether edge to you is a shop, ship, manufacturing plant, remote/branch/small office, oil rig, hotel or anywhere else – you need to have a small compute presence. If you are holding 70% of your corporate data there, it needs to be secure, resilient and easy to manage. It is not in a room next to the people that are looking after it; simple to manage and maintain. Typically, in the past this has meant compromise, as it is hard to justify a £50k price tag and local IT presence on a remote solution. Especially when we might only want to support 20 people or have a handful of virtual machines in place, and its likely that we are going to have multiple locations to cover.

Scale Computing by their very name can scale down as well as up. So much so, that customers are able to run a 3-node hyper-converged, resilient, self healing cluster, with 3 years 24×7 remote support for a handful of virtual machines for (much) less than £10,000. Yet they are still able to take advantages of datacentre level technologies such as snapshotting, cloning, replication, NVME disk performance and automatic protection on node failure. Deployment of a 3-node cluster takes less than 2hrs and we can train a team to do all of the admin tasks in half a day. Scale’s latest package, SC Fleet Manager, allows customers to monitor, manage and update one to thousands of clusters in different locations. A single support number for the whole stack!

ET Works have the ability to not only demo the technology, but also help customers run a full technology proof of concept at their edge, to ensure that when transitioning from your current environment you wont have any shocks. We are undergoing one right now that has involved workload migration from Hyper-V and VMWare, and includes the setup and testing of VDI, databases, backup and DR with the customer’s data in place and their local team in the driving seat.

Why not challenge the team to architect an edge solution for you today!