Scale Computing Provides Hyperconvergence for City of St. Cloud

Scale Computing, Inc. announced that the City of St. Cloud, Minnesota, has deployed its HC3 Virtualization Platform for its price, ease of use and  reliability as part of an ERP rollout rather than purchasing an additional SAN to host the new solution.

Nicknamed the Granite City after the quarries and stone-finishing businesses that gave it its early economic boost, St. Cloud is the 10th largest city in Minnesota with a population of more than 66,000 people. The city’s mission is to provide public services for its residents in a cost-effective, responsive, innovative and professional manner given the changing needs and resources available.

In an effort to fulfill that mission, St. Cloud’s IT staff decided it would try to pilot a project with Scale Computing rather than purchasing another X-IO SAN as part of a dedicated environment for its new ERP solution.

After a one-hour demonstration, they learned everything they needed to know in order to run the system before beginning operations and deploying servers on it. Scale’s ‘datacenter in a box’ provided St. Cloud with the reliability and performance needed to support the city’s mission-critical ERP infrastructure at a price point estimated as less than 15% of a comparable X-IO SAN even before VMware licensing fees.

“In the VMware environment and putting VMware tools on it – that’s a cost as well as a hassle – we have to upgrade constantly,” said Andrew Neussendorfer, IT programmer and technician, City of St. Cloud. “Every time they come out with patches, then we have to run updates on all the servers, which at times actually brings them offline requiring restarts when you upgrade the tools. Scale Computing saves us a tremendous amount of time.“

Scale Computing’s HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 products make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.

After passing the ERP pilot project, the City of St. Cloud purchased a second Scale appliance and has begun to migrate over servers from its existing SAN and VMware environment. A third unit will be purchased in the near future for use at the city’s police department.

“Rather than repeat the expense, management headaches and configuration required of their existing virtualized X-IO SAN, St. cloud decided to look for a different approach to virtualizing their new ERP environment,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, Scale Computing. “With its scale-out architecture, HC3 is the perfect alternative to expensive and difficult-to-manage SANs because it combines the servers, storage and virtualization into a single, appliance-like solution to provide HA for VMs without the licensing fees normally associated with a traditional virtualization deployment.“