Scale Computing, the hyperconverged infrastructure supplier, has launched the HC3250D, an all-NVMe data centre system for performance-centric database, analytics and VDI work.
Dave Demlow, Scale VP of product management, said in a statement: “Both persistent and non-persistent VDI workloads thrive on the newly redesigned underlying storage layer, which is created to maximise performance. With the new pressure on IT to enable remote work whenever necessary, this appliance is an excellent foundation for VDI deployments from a several hundred users to a few thousand.”
Steve McDowell, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, supplied a canned quote: “Enterprise and SMB customers have a need for an HCI solution that can service larger databases, mid-range VDI, and other performance-intensive use cases.”
The HC3250D is the first model in the HC3000 Series and operates in enterprise and SMB data centres and also at rack-equipped remote and branch office and edge sites. Its NVMe storage architecture requires no manual configuration and consumes less system RAM, according to Scale, which means more RAM is made available to virtual machines and their applications.
The HC3250D has more CPU power, faster networking and speedier storage than its HCxxxx sisters. This HC3000 Series sits between the HC1000 entry-level data centre appliances and the high-end HC5000 appliances.
A comparison with the HC1000 and HC5000 shows the HC3250D is the only product in Scale’s HCxxxx range going above 10gigabit Ethernet, with its support of 2 x 25GbitE links. It has the same 128GB to 1538GB memory range as the HC5250D. Also the HC3250D is the only Scale data centre product with all-NVMe SSD storage – up to 76.8TB raw capacity in its 1U cabinet. Other models use slower access SDS and/or nearline disk drives.
All Scale system run HyperCore OS, with applications running in KVM virtual machines and accessing ‘Scribe’ storage resources. They feature intelligent automation for self-healing and high availability to keep clusters running through component and appliance failures. Scale supplies integrated disaster recovery capabilities to protect data and workloads to remote sites for fast failover and recovery.
Recently HPE boosted its SimpliVity 325 HCI system for VDI use by giving it dual AMD EPYC 7002 processors. The SimpliVity 325, 1U in size, has more memory than Scale’s HC3250D, at 2,048GB, but slower networking, with only 1 and 10GbitE. It also has less storage; up to 6 x 1.92TB SSDs, understood to be SAS interface drives.
Scale had not released HC3250D pricing and availability details, at time of publication.
