Hyperconverged appliance provider Scale Computing today announced a partnership with energy management company APC by Schneider Electric to deliver a Micro Data Center in a Box solution across North America. Under the terms of the agreement, Indianapolis-based Scale Computing supplies its HC3 HyperCore software while APC delivers a self-contained and secure enclosure. This solution allows channel partners, MSPs, and IT organizations to deliver a complete, energy-efficient IT solution that is pretested, optimized, and easily deployed.
APC by Schneider Electric is “basically providing all the racking and the power and the cable, and we are providing the hardware [the HC3 appliances] to go in it,” says Scott Mann, director, North America channel, at Scale. “Promark Technology, which is an arm of Ingram Micro, [is] assembling it for us and then shipping it all out. So basically when it gets to your data center, it’s racked, stacked, plugged in, and ready to go,” which is what MSPs want, Mann says.
This will avoid the necessity of sending staff to a customer site to set the solution up, Mann says. “That will save them a lot of overhead and they can just have that technical asset there to do the more advanced stuff, the migrations, the actual installation of everything.”
Channel partners are enthusiastic, he says. “Everybody loves the idea of not having to use their expensive resources. That is the big savings.”
The Micro Data Center in a Box requires minimal IT expertise and no additional infrastructure software. It is designed to be a highly available, self-managing platform for running applications at the edge, according to Scale.
Mann says Micro Data Center in a Box can be utilized in a traditional data center, but it’s suited for smaller configurations. For example, he says, an MSP might have customers with small, widely dispersed sites but no IT on staff. The MSP can have Micro Data Center in a Box drop shipped to that site and then remote in to set it up.
With a pay-as-you-grow flexibility, organizations can start small and grow their IT when needed. In addition, it has built-in redundancy to provide business continuity, even in remote edge locations.
“One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today is how to simplify edge IT environments, where resources and staffing are often quite different,” said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing, in a press statement. “Deploying our Micro Data Center in a Box gives organizations the flexibility to quickly scale capacity and computing power at the edge, while eliminating the complexity of managing separate hypervisors, backup software, and disaster recovery software. This fully integrated solution saves time, money and resources, which will be a game changer for these edge and remote environments, and for those channel partners and MSPs who serve them across the world.”
