Scale Computing: Simply Better Storage (iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, Clustered SAN)

Forbes names Scale one of America’s Most Promising Companies

from Forbes, 09.16.2009

Scale Computing is selected by Forbes Magazine as one of America's 20 most promising companies.

Scale Computing Raises $9M in Second Round Led by Benchmark

from , 03.10.2010

Scale Computing, which sells storage solutions to small and medium businesses, raised $9 million in a second round led byÂ Benchmark Capital.

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Scale Computing lands $9M in venture funds

from Indianapolis Star , 03.09.2010

Scale Computing -- an Indianapolis startup attracting national buzz for its data-storage devices -- announced Monday it has received $9 million of venture funding.

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Scale Computing lands $9M from Silicon Valley venture firm

from Indianapolis Business Journal , 03.09.2010

Data-storage upstart Scale Computing on Monday announced a $9 million investment from Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark Capital.

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VAD Promark Distributes Scale Computing

from StorageNewsletter, 02.23.2010

Promark and Scale Computing announce a new distribution relationship

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Scale Computing Achieves VMware Ready Status

from StorageNewsletter, 02.10.2010

Scale Computing announces that fourteen of its storage solutions have achieved VMware Ready' status.

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Scale Computing succeeds quickly after co-founder moves it to Indiana

from Indianapolis Business Journal, 02.08.2010

Not even a year has passed since Scale Computing launched its first product

Not even a year has passed since Scale Computing launched its first product, yet CEO Jeff Ready forecasts 2010 revenue with the confidence of a meteorologist giving the three-day outlook. Not even a year has passed since Scale Computing launched its first product, yet CEO Jeff Ready forecasts 2010 revenue with the confidence of a meteorologist giving the three-day outlook. “I think there’s a good chance we could do north of $10 million. We’re certainly on par to do something in that ballpark,” said Ready, co-founder of Indianapolis-based Scale.

This is coming from a guy who started out building a supercomputer to forecast the performance of financial stocks, but eventually shelved it.

Yet attempts at forecasting ultimately have paid off for Ready, whose company develops data storage devices for small to medium-size businesses. The devices are based on the advanced parallel file system found in supercomputers.

Hitting $10 million in sales this year would be a huge increase for the young company looking at perhaps $2 million in sales when the books on 2009 are tallied.

Forbes ranked Scale No. 16 among the fastest-growing young companies. The New York Times cited the firm’s innovation and ability to adapt after seeing the market prospects sour for a supercomputer for financial markets.

“They are in a technology space that is very hot right now,” said Charles King, chief analyst at San Francisco-based Pund-IT Inc.

The demand for cost-effective data storage will only grow with increased digitization of records such as in the health care field, said Don Aquilano, managing partner of Indianapolis-based Blue Chip Venture Co., which took a stake in Scale. “It’s a great market to compete in. It’s $45 billion and growing.”

One significant aspect of Scale is that it brings to Indiana a company involved in not only software but also hardware and logistics, Aquilano said.

That it was started by a group of “serial entrepreneurs” who’ve formed multiple companies also makes it a significant asset, he added.

If it seems like Scale came out of nowhere, it did, sort of-out of the San Francisco suburb of San Carlos, Calif., pop 27,714, where it was founded. Ready, a Hoosier native and a Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology grad, announced he was moving the company here last year with the help of a $2 million grant from the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund.

Jeff Ready and two fellow Rose-Hulman grads scrapped development of a supercomputer to predict stock market performance to create an expandable data storage device for business. Scale Computing could hit $10 million in revenues this year. (IBJ Photo/ Perry Reichanadter)

“At this time last year, the only person in Indiana [at Scale] was me,” said Ready, 35. Of the company’s 33 employees, most are here-at Purdue’s technology park, south of Indianapolis International Airport. A handful of engineers stayed back in California.

Scale could easily have 100 employees by year-end, Ready said. That’s a number not usually seen with companies until they’ve raised at least $20 million. Scale has raised a mere $5 million, with about $3 million of that in traditional venture capital.

One reason is that Scale enjoys operating efficiencies in Indiana it wouldn’t back at its old location at the northern end of Silicon Valley. It has just under 4,000 square feet at the Purdue technology park. It also uses a third-party manufacturing firm to make its storage devices, so its capital costs are low.

“I’ve driven over to FedEx at 10:30 at night myself,” the CEO said of Scale’s entrepreneurial trappings.

Such growth pains are a good problem to have, Ready said. They’re growth pains made possible by a motherboard of a failure.

Restless entrepreneurs

Five years ago, Ready and old pals from Rose-Hulman were itching to launch yet another company-the latest in a string of tech businesses since starting their own Internet service provider while in college in the mid-1990s. Ready, Scott Loughmiller and Ehren Maedge met while freshmen in 1992. This time, they would work on software to predict stock performance, using anti-spam technology they developed at Corvigo, a company they started a few years earlier and later sold for $42.5 million.

They’d also need hardware-a really powerful computer to handle 30 gb or 40 gb per day of historical market data they’d have to input daily. What emerged was their own supercomputer, known as “Super Bruce,” a monstrosity of 400 processors that generated so much heat it required industrial-size fans to cool.

“It was more of a science project,” Ready said.

Maybe at first, but Super Bruce later had the same capability of a supercomputer BMW used for aerodynamic modeling, Ready reckoned. But as Super Bruce grew, it became costly.

“Every time somebody had to buy more parts, someone would have to write a check,” he said. In time, “we were looking at millions of dollars on a storage system.”

Their crystal ball of a contraption worked and could have made them rich as the centerpiece of their own hedge fund. But the stock market downturn ultimately doomed prospects. Eventually, they realized Super Bruce had other applications. Its computing architecture could be used as the basis of a low-cost storage device.

“Without realizing it, we had started building something that had broader applications in the market,” Ready recalled.

Business model reboot

Essentially, what they did was take the cluster-type file system that allows supercomputers to handle massive amounts of data and adapted it for business. The product consists of boxes, or nodes, that can be stacked and added to as a business has more storage needs. They claim the system can cost 75 percent less than conventional storage systems that require expensive equipment upgrades. There’s no single controller or “brain,” but rather all the nodes contain the same data. There’s not a single failure point for something to go wrong.

Moreover, the software uses artificial intelligence that does the work of a cadre of IT administrators serving a supercomputer. Ready figures he’s replacing a $200,000-a-year systems administrator.

“One of the most intriguing things to me is the sheer scalability,” said King, noting the ease of adding modules.

“This capability plays very effectively in the small-to-medium business space,” he said.

Although the computer market itself has seen a slump, “one area that really has not seen a reduction in scope is data storage. They’re in a sweet spot,” King added.

The small Hoosier firm even got the attention of IBM. Scale is offering its Intelligent Clustered Storage device for IBM’s System X servers. The storage array is being distributed by Avnet Technology, which is IBM’s largest worldwide distributor.

Eventually, Ready would like to bring manufacturing in-house, as volume increases. He’s sour on the idea of outsourcing customer support to India or Pakistan.

“I have a desire to do this company differently than sort of the standing orders of a typical Silicon Valley startup.”

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Scale Computing Line of Products Achieves VMware Ready Status

from InfoStor, 02.02.2010

Fourteen of Scale's storage solutions have achieved VMware Ready status

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GEO Foundation cuts desktop costs by $60K

from NetworkWorld, 01.27.2010

GEO worked with Scale Computing Inc. for more scalable storage depending on future needs of the schools.

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Citrix and Scale Computing Chosen by Indiana Charter School

from StorageNewsletter, 01.21.2010

Citrix Systems, Inc. and Scale Computing announced that their solutions helped the GEO Foundation cut storage costs by nearly 50%

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Computer system overhaul yields $60,000 savings in one month

from School CIO, 01.13.2010

The GEO Foundation turned to Scale Computing's Intelligent Clustered StorageT (ICS) technology

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GEO Foundation cuts desktop costs by $60K

from IT World Canada, 01.12.2010

A school management services provider estimates it will cost a mere US$18,000 to upgrade its desktops during a five-year period.

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Charter School Organization Virtualizes Infrastructure

from The T.H.E. Journal, 01.12.2010

GEO Foundation said the implementation of technology from Citrix Systems and Scale Computing generated $60,000 in savings in the first month.

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BEST PRACTICES: Classroom in the Cloud

from Scholastic Administrator, 01.12.2010

Citrix and Scale Computing coordinate a joint project that can make one-to-one classroom computing much cheaper.

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Indiana charter schools save big with virtualization

from ZDnet, 01.12.2010

The GEO Foundation, the major supporter of charter schools in Indiana (as well as Colorado) announced today

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Products of the Week

from NetworkWorld, 01.06.2010

Our round-up of intriguing new products from Symantec, HP, IBM and Scale Computing among others

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Scale Computing Selected as Channel Insider’s Innovator of the Year

from Channel Insider, 12.22.2009

The Channel Insider Bull’s Eye Awards is a recognition of excellence of the vendors and communities that comprise the channel.

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Where is Dell Leaving its Channel Partners?

from Channel Insider, 12.15.2009

As Dell moves upmarket, where does that leave its channel partners?

As part of its assault on the increasingly competitive data center market, Dell has made a number of storage-related announcements, including new 10GbE arrays, its first FCoE offering, and new consulting services.

The battle for the data center has been heating up recently with the likes of Cisco’s California, HP’s Converged Infrastructure, IBM’s Smarter Planet and the disappearance of Sun, so Dell’s decision to throw its hat in the ring with its own IT-as-a-commodity approach should come as no surprise. However, somewhat buried in the company’s grand Advanced Infrastructure Management strategy were a number of announcements that should have a significant impact on the storage market, including Dell’s fledgling channel.

The biggest news is the addition of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to its iSCSI storage lineup, which offers huge payoffs to customers, says Travis Vigil, a senior manager responsible for Dell’s EqualLogic product family.

Besides giving Dell a ready-made channel, the EqualLogic acquisition has paid big dividends in the last two years. The company has added nearly 12,000 new customers and more than 240 partners since January 2008. EqualLogic product line revenue has increased by 31 percent year-over-year since FYQ3, and Dell leads the iSCSI market with more than 33 percent revenue share.

The new EqualLogic PS6010 and PS6510 storage arrays deliver up to ten times more bandwidth per port and up to two-and-a-half times more bandwidth per array than previous versions. There’s also a 100GB solid state disk (SSD) option available in the PS6510S.

Dell also announced new firmware updates that enable customers to scale performance and capacity with 16 members per group, up from the previous 12 member. Vigil says they can now scale up to 768TB per group with 1TB SATA drives, and there’s also a 50 percent cable reduction. In addition, the 10K SAS capacity has been increased from 86.4TB/group to 460.8TB/group.

Other software enhancements include SAN HeadQuarters2.0 which features experimental analysis capabilities and a comprehensive set of predefined business reports.

On the networking side Dell announced the PowerConnect a 1U, 24-port 10GbE networking switch with SFP+ and four combo 10GbE Base-T ports with full wire speed 10GbE capabilities across all ports. Another interesting announcement is Dell’s first firs FCoE product for those that want to start migration from fibre channel to Ethernet, says Vigil. The Qlogic solutions for Dell PowerEdge blades allow users to unify existing FibreChannel SANs onto a 10GbE fabric with FCoE functionality.

Last but not least, Dell announced new services. Proconsult Storage Consolidation Consulting will provide expertise for the integration of Dell/EMC storage products and help them achieve the appropriate level of performance and data protection.

Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT, says the most significant aspect of the announcement is Dell’s continuing efforts to deliver highly integrated, end-to-end IT infrastructure solutions, including management and services components.

“The evolution of 10 Gb/E, which some would say has taken a bit longer to crawl out of the swamp than expected, should pay dividends on Dell’s EqualLogic investment,” says King. “To fully achieve its potential, iSCSI storage requires highly robust, flexible and scalable network technologies – which fits 10 Gb/E to a ‘t’. Combined with other 10Gb/E enabled Dell and partners’ products, the company’s new EqualLogic PS6500 solutions should provide Dell customers the performance required for both business-class applications like Oracle and Microsoft SQL, and bandwidth-intensive processes.

While Vigil says the right things about the channel opportunity, including the much bigger installed base and the opportunity to go after new customers, competitor Scale Computing’s Peter Fuller, VP of Marketing, needs convincing.

“Like I mentioned, we view this as no surprise as Dell is continuing to use the EqualLogic line to further compete up market with the EMC’s. One may question, with Dell’s track record with the channel, if they also plan to offer this solution directly, or if this is a move that will benefit Dell’s direct sales force in competing with EMC more than Dell’s channel partners.”

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IBM Teams with Scale to Provide Unified Storage

from IT Business Edge, 12.11.2009

IBM is well on the way toward unifying SAN and NAS infrastructures through an alliance with Scale Computing.

Does Dell Computer really have the chops to go up against Cisco, HP and IBM for bragging rights to the unified data center?

That question came into focus this week with the company’s expanded partnership strategy aimed at shoring up both the networking and systems management arms of its data center portfolio. The company has begun integrating QLogic 8100 10 converged network adapters (CNAs) into a range of PowerEdge servers, as well as 10 GbE switches from Brocade and QLogic into select EqualLogic storage systems - both moves aimed at fostering the kind of network convergence that reports indicate will be a major goal for data centers over the next decade.

At the same time, the company is bolstering its management stack, built largely on technology designed by Scalent Systems, to include both an infrastructure management module and a systems lifecycle module. The aim here is to provide deeper visibility into network infrastructure and unify overall data center management under a single platform.

Taking on such big shoes as Cisco and HP is no easy feat, but Dell has been making a pretty good living for the past two decades selling low-cost compatible systems to enterprises looking to expand their primary systems installations. The company hopes to continue that strategy, except this time it wants to be the primary systems provider, with the proviso that it can still provide open systems that protect against single vendor lock-in.

That strategy may prove effective against Cisco and HP, but it could be a hard sell for IBM customers. That company has pursued a number of third-party suppliers, particularly on the networking side, that provide a great deal of design flexibility when it comes to integrating network architectures. The company is also well on the way toward unifying SAN and NAS infrastructures through an alliance with Scale Computing. That company’s Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) system is based on IBM’s Global Parallel File System, which brings such high-performance techniques like the parallel file system to mid-tier and small enterprises. As CTO Edge’s Mike Vizard points out, the package provides up to 4 TB for both block-level iSCSI SANs and file-based NAS systems.

For Dell, the name of the game has traditionally been high-value hardware at cut-rate prices. That strategy should continue to serve it well as it seeks to become a front-line data center provider. But since the goal now is to become the main platform provider, it will also have to convince CIOs across the board that it can be a reliable technology partner, rather than a mere supplier.

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Taking the Complexity Out of Storage

from CTOEdge, 12.11.2009

With the advent of companies such as Scale Computing, we’re starting to see a convergence of storage architectures that promises to dramatically cut costs.

There have always been two separate storage worlds. One was defined by files and relied heavily on network attached storage (NAS) systems. The other is defined by block-level storage, typically associated with a database, defined by storage area networks (SAN).

Up until recently, NAS and SAN systems required different storage infrastructure. But with the advent of companies such as Scale Computing, we’re starting to see a convergence of storage architectures that promises to dramatically cut costs in this area.

Scale Computing offers a range of 1 to 4 TB storage arrays that make uses of a cluster file system that stores data in a block-level format. The end result is that the Scale Computing systems can be deployed simultaneously as an ISCI-based SAN that can support a database and as a NAS system that can be used store files.

According to Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready, the core idea behind starting Scale Computing was to find a way to bring storage array pricing in line with the actual cost of disk drives. To do that, Scale Computing eschewed the approach of traditional storage vendors that rely heavily on custom processors and firmware in favor of an approach that essentially puts the management of the storage backplane into software running across the network.

The end result is that Scale Computing can deliver about 3 TB of storage for about $11,000. And because the system is software-based, it automatically discovers additional nodes of storage as they are added to the overall system.

But Scale Computing didn’t stop there. Ready notes that the company has also dramatically simplified the storage management process using a graphical user interface that makes storage clustering technology accessible to just about any IT organization. To that end, in its latest release, Scale has added support for snapshot replication between distributed storage nodes, giving customers a simple way to do backup across a network of Scale Computing storage arrays.

As IT organizations look to cut storage costs at a time when the growth of data continues to spiral out of control, many IT organizations have been moving towards creating either pools of SAN storage using storage virtualization or relying on clustering software to create pools of storage for files using separate systems from companies such as Dell Equallogic, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, IBM, NetApp and Isilon. The interesting thing about Scale Computing is that what we’re really talking about now is creating one giant pool of storage for everything short of high performance applications that need the high-performance bandwidth associated with Fibre-channel storage systems.

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New Scale Computing Clustered Storage Targets EMC, Dell

from Channel Insider, 12.10.2009

The company is on track to achieve $2 million in revenue by the end of 2009, up from $30,000 in 2008, after signing up 50 partners and two distributors to go to market.

Clustered storage provider Scale Computing recently released version 2.0 of its product offering to its 50-plus VAR community. The new product aims to reduce cost and improve control and ease of use for midmarket IT administrators. The product release comes on the heels of a tremendous growth year for Scale, and, according to Scale CEO Jeff Ready, positions the company to expand its reach into the enterprise, a market traditionally dominated by EMC.

New features of Scale’s Intelligent Clustered Storage 2.0 (ICS) include an improved graphical user interface as well as the addition of snapshot and replication technologies. Scale also released the availability of a four terabyte node pack. Previously, customers could only purchase one and two terabyte nodes.

Today, Scale focuses on the midmarket and small business sectors, but plans to capitalize on its recent enterprise wins to move upstream and pitch its solutions at the enterprise level. Although the company has enterprise-size customers like Motorola, most of the deployments are limited to individual lines of business.

Advanced Media Services(AMS) distributes Scale as its only clustered storage solution, and also distributes traditional storage systems and networking solutions from Riverbed to a major national technology reseller.

According to Bob Jangro, vice president at AMS, Scale fits the mid-market and small business market well because its design enables customers to purchase small amounts of storage as needed and allows customer to budget for storage over time instead of requiring a huge purchase up front.

“Scale is pretty unique, and with people’s budgets the way they are in the current economy they can use their budget money more efficiently,” said Jangro. “We have more traditional SAN solutions that we offer, but Scale provides a nice entry price point and by the nature of its design you can get in at a low cost and, then, scale so you don’t have to buy more than you need to handle your three years of growth.”

According to Scale CEO and founder Jeff Ready, 2009 resulted in tremendous growth for the company. Scale is on track to achieve $2 million by the end of 2009, up from $30,000 in 2008. Scale began 2009 with a beta product, one reseller partner and only three reference customers. The release of ICS 2.0 is the second major product release for Scale in 2009. The company released version 1.0 of its product in March. To further underscore the company’s growth, Ready said Scale, who sells exclusively through the channel, signed up over 50 reseller partners and secured two distribution agreements, one with Avnet. Ready said Scale anticipates even greater growth in 2010, pointing to revenue targets between $8 million to $10 million.

“We’re growing leaps and bounds,” said Ready.”We have folks like Motorola and Logitech on board as customers — and driving adoption is the exponential growth of data need and the need to have a system that scales with you and is easy to administer without administering without extensive training.”

Ready points to a recent study by the Berkley School of Management that found more data has been created in the last three years than in the last 40,000 years of human history, combined.

Scale’s sights are high, but, displacing big boys like EMC in the heart of the enterprise data center will be challenging for the start-up company.

“You have mission-critical data, whose system are you going to put it on?” said Jangro. “That’s EMC’s business - that’s mission critical data and its why customers pay millions of dollars for it and support. Maybe it’s a function of Scale being new, but could they get there? Absolutely.”

Time will tell.

Scale’s sales and management team is comprised of storage market veterans from EqualLogic, Sun and EMC. Today, Scale competes mainly with other clustered storage providers like Dell EqualLogic, Isilon, and FalconStor.

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