Hyperconverged infrastructure appliance vendor Scale Computing has raised $55 million to grow its Internet-edge business.
Scale Computing is virtually the last specialist HCI start-up standing in a heavily consolidated market that is dominated by mainstream players Dell EMC, HPE and Cisco.
The funding round was led by a group of funds managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and takes Scale’s total funding to $159 million. Scale’s prior injection of capital was a $34.8 million G-round in 2018.
Scale has previously launched a series of products for the edge, such as the cigarette box-sized HCI edge appliance, the HE 150, and has built a growing customer base around its Scale Computing Platform. It is now getting funding to, er, scale that business faster.
CEO and co-founder Jeff Ready, said: “Data is moving to the edge twice as fast as it moved to the cloud. Management of the edge is an inverted problem from management of the data center. A typical data center deployment represents hundreds or thousands of servers at one or two locations. On the other hand, a typical edge deployment is a handful of servers each at hundreds or thousands of locations. This requires a completely different approach to deployment and management.”
Scale says the SC//Platform uses autonomous, self-healing technology that enables remote edge management of applications and systems at scale, keeps applications running as errors happen, and uses machine intelligence rather than human administrators. The SC//HyperCore software delivers high-availability remote, on-premises edge computing with disaster recovery.
Pete D. Chung, Managing Director and Head of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, said: “The technological advantage of Scale Computing’s edge computing platform solves endemic customer problems through enhanced resiliency, manageability and efficacy of their IT infrastructures. We are thrilled to help the company build upon their success with this funding.”
Scale will spend the cash on investments in people and R&D, and restructure its debt facilities. It says it wants to expand the capabilities of its edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged products.
