Transcript
Hi, Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and I'm here today talking about one of my favorite topics, which is hyper convergence infrastructure, where it's going, how do you get out to the edge and eventually, uh, you know, what's happening with NOx? We're going to talk about NOx today. Hold on just a second. Hey, Mitchell, welcome to our show. Hey, thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Uh, it's been a while since we've had scale computing on, and, uh, there's a lot to cover here. Uh, to just to catch folks up. But before we get too deep into it, uh, just give us a thumbnail, sort of the elevator pitch of scale computing today. Where do you guys fit in the market? Yeah, absolutely. A great question. So we are a, um, infrastructure platform, um, where we deliver a full virtualization stack and a full cloud based, fleet wide monitoring and management to small IT departments, but also MSPs and large distributed enterprises with thousands or hundreds of thousands of locations that need infrastructure. All right. So this is pretty cool. Uh, days for Hyperconvergence and where we're going forward. Uh, lots of stuff happening. Uh, let's talk about VMware. We can't avoid the elephant in the room here. So VMware gets acquired by Broadcom here. Throws the whole world into a tizzy. Uh what what do you see from your perspective, uh, happening there. And what's the opportunity for scale computing now that VMware is doing crazy things to their own market. Yeah, it's it's um, well, it's an exciting time for us. Uh, we we launched the core piece of our virtualization product all the way back in 2012, and since then have been really routinely displacing VMware for customers. And this is only kind of accelerated that trend. Um, we are differentiated in that we are incredibly easy to deploy, maintain and our low cost leader. So if an organization has limited IT resources either at one location or several locations, um, scale computing hyper core, our virtualization product name is a great alternative to VMware because you can cut down on the ongoing maintenance complexity and costs. So rather than needing a whole bevy of, you know, VMware certified IT admins, um, you can deploy a scale computing cluster and we specialize in an A set it and forget it type of deployment, where once you go and instantiate the cluster, you've infrastructure that's just running, and then you don't need to spend, you know, hours and hours of of management overhead, just keeping the lights on, which allows you to go focus on your applications itself. So, you know, we're kind of the the easy, reliable button with on site infrastructure. And that's typically where customers look to kind of improve when they're used to extensive maintenance and management with VMware. Right. Because, you know, VMware wasn't really hyper converged infrastructure until you guys were right. And then they came along and said, no, no, we are too. And I was like, well, I don't know. They were working hard towards it all those years and never quite in my mind got there. Uh, where, where scale has always been, you know, fully converged, uh, you know, by, by definition, the way we define things in the market. Um, so there's big opportunity there. Uh, you know, and I think a good thing for people to understand is, you know, if we're looking at data center and we're looking at giant deployments and footprints, and then we're looking at distributed edges, where where do you guys fit in? Mostly in that kind of picture. Yeah, that's a good question. We focus much more on the the distributed side. So because our solution is so, um, reliable and easy to manage, it scales at hundreds or thousands of sites. So just as when we launched in 2012, a one man IT department didn't have enough time to like, manage a traditional 3 to 1 VMware infrastructure. If you're a thousand site retailer and you need to run applications at the edge, right? You know, in store, you certainly don't have an IT person at each location. And our, you know, value adds of reliability and ease of use really scale when you need deployments that just kind of run without babysitting. So definitely much more on the distributed side of the equation than, you know, huge, huge, you know, multi multi-petabyte data center deployments. Right? So we're not going to be deploying 40 racks of scale in a data center. But we might be deploying, you know, 40 clusters of of scale into different distributed locations that that a small team might have to run. Yeah I would say that's more common. And to be clear, we do have some large data center deployments, but typically, uh, customers are coming to us with more of those distributed problem sets. Okay. And so let's talk about, uh, the the middle, the middle of the group here, which would be Nutanix, who's also, you know, taking great pains to try to find VMware customers that are dissatisfied. How do you how would you compare yourself with Nutanix and what advantages would you offer there? Yeah, absolutely. So we are low cost leader against Nutanix. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that. But additionally, it's similar to VMware where we really prioritize ease of use and ensure that it's not a convoluted solution that's hard to maintain or hard to understand. Um, going hand in hand with that is the fact that our storage architecture. So as you. And we are a full HCI solution. Stores will be embedded in the hosts, um, just like it would with, uh, Nutanix appliance. The difference is, though, our, um, proprietary Oracle architecture called scribe is super lightweight and means that we don't we don't rely on a virtual storage appliance like Nutanix. And as a result, we consume far fewer resources just to run our virtualization and software defined storage stack. And so, you know, obviously that's great for any user as if they have more resources at their disposal. But too, when we think about the edge, it also means that we can run on physically much smaller pieces of hardware than like a Nutanix or a traditional VMware environment. So and that's where we're. Talking about those nooks, right. The little little. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, our operational efficiency there in the product lets us deploy on nooks. And that's not just, you know, for home labbing or for, for testing. It's the most common hardware platform that we see deployed with our enterprise edge customers. And it's a hardware ecosystem that we're double doubling down on. So we started out with just kind of the traditional 4x4 knock form factor with with a single Nic port and, you know, a core Intel CPUs. We've since expanded and now we have larger footprints with dual NICs to provide some more, um, reliability there and then are looking even at productize, those even beefier, kind of like small form factor devices that might be in between a traditional one use server and the 4x4 knock, just so we can continue to hit all of those remote needs and match any sort of capacity point that's required by customers. All right. So we know we know VMware customers are out there looking for their plan B and plan C and all their alternatives. How hard is it to to say, let's take a chunk of our edge deployment? If I'm a medium medium sized company and migrated into scale. Yeah, it's really pretty easy. And we have several different tools that we position and recommend based on the needs of the customer. So our most common, um, path to migration is a tool that we resell called hyper core Move. And that allows you to virtually eliminate or minimize very heavily downtime required in a migration. So you can have your existing production applications and machines spin up your, um, what will be your production machines and hyper core and then use that tool that we sell to cut over. It's very seamless and minimize downtime. Similarly, we have a, um, integration with the company called Acronis, which is typically known as a backup, a vendor, but is a part of our backup integration. We have a feature called convert to VM, where if you take a backup of a production machine that's not on scale, you can reference that backup no matter what storage it resides on, and have Acronis automatically instantiate that backup as a powered off VM running on Hyper Core. So that way the the cutover is as simple as just powering on that VM. And then from there you can also upload foreign VMs or foreign virtual drive formats directly to the media section of a hyper core cluster. And then from there, um, spin up a VM and attach that data. So that's going to be a little bit more of a, a downtime, um, migration path. But it's just going to come down to kind of picking and choosing those several options based on the needs of each application that's getting moved over. All right. Now, once I've got, uh, a large fleet of these clusters deployed out there, how do I manage them? Well, yeah, that was a leading question. Notice I used fleet in the manner. Yeah, yeah. I like it, I like it. So, um, originally our main product was just hyper core. It was just our HCI virtualization stack. Since then, we have launched a brand new product called Fleet Manager, which is a it's a SaaS monitoring tool specifically designed to monitor and manage a huge fleet of hyper core clusters. And so that's where from a single pane of glass, you can say, all right, if I'm a quick serve restaurant with 250 scale clusters at all my locations, I can manage the health of those from my single fleet manager instance. And that's also where we provide some ease of management benefits, like our zero touch provisioning technology. Um, our a tool called Secure Link to remotely access hyper core clusters in the field and um, historical reporting as well. All right. And I'm assuming that that, you know, that perspective allows a very small staff to stay on top of their management, their maintenance and other things like that. Um, let's let's just get to the get to sort of the point here. What does it look like from an ongoing management perspective? What's someone's day to day experience looking at a lot of scale devices out in the field. Yeah. So and this is something I've been hitting on quite a bit. And it is a easy to use product that just kind of runs. Um, because that that was the need that we needed to fill the SMB. And it's the problem we're solving for enterprise edge customers. So, you know, the reason that we have edge computing as a section of it is the fact that we now understand that while most many, perhaps most applications and makes sense and is efficient to run them in the cloud, you have these use cases where it's not efficient. And so an example I always throw out is we are pretty heavy in the maritime space where, you know, you have actual shipping vessels that need to run a handful of really critical applications to support their ongoing operation, but they can't run them in the cloud because they don't have consistent internet connection as they're making their cross ocean voyages. And so they're able to go and deploy clusters on those ships, run their applications, and then, crucially, not have to really manage the infrastructure day in and day out. They are just, you know, managing or accessing the applications that infrastructure is, is, uh, supporting. And so kind of the design thesis here on the product organization at scale is, you know, we know that there are these use cases where applications should be run at the edge of the network outside of a traditional data center or outside of the cloud. And we want to provide the infrastructure platform to run those applications while delivering a cloud like experience. So in other words, we want to make sure managing a thousand hyper core clusters feels like you're managing one deployment, not managing a thousand separate deployments. All right. That's that's a good answer. Uh, if someone wants to learn a little bit more about this, maybe you can find out how this is licensed and supported. Uh, Mitchell, what would you tell them? Yeah, I would say go to our website. We have a lot of good information and also some really interesting campaigns running right now for customers that are looking to move from VMware. And so, um, you know, stop by scale computing.com, see the information about the product and then understand how we could potentially displace VMware. And we even have a program, for example, that like helps you, um, deal with existing VMware licenses for up to a year if you want to evaluate moving over to our platform. So there's there are a lot of exciting pieces in place, but, um, you can find more information on our website as well as get in contact with us directly. All right. Thank you very much for being here today, folks. You've heard this. If you've got VMware footprint or even other company footprints, which are large license costs and you're looking at an edge deployment, are you looking at the distributed part of your environment and architecture? Check out Scale Computing if you haven't already. I'm sure they've got something that would fit. I love the little Knox, by the way. Mitchell, uh, thank you for being here again today. Uh, take care folks.
