New Scale Computing Clustered Storage Targets EMC, Dell

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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