Introducing the Single Node Scale HC3 Appliance
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Since the news was quietly leaked here the other day, we wanted to take a moment and tell you about the new, single node Scale HC3 appliance and officially answer questions as they may arise. Scale Computing now offers our Scale HC3 platform in a single node configuration. This allows customers to deploy the Scale HC3 to situations where the capacity or high availability of the three node (or greater) cluster is not warranted such as ROBO (remote office / branch office) locations and SMB or even SOHO (small office / home office) customers that cannot justify the cost of high availability but do want Scale's flexibility, support and ease of use.
The single node configuration comes with the same easy to use all inclusive management interface, complete support and advanced storage layer that you expect from Scale, just in a smaller package without high availability. We hope that this is of interest to many small businesses or company divisions that would benefit from all that Scale offers but have been unable to do so due to the entry point of having to have three nodes for a minimum cluster.
Customers starting with a single node configuration will be able to transparently upgrade to three or more nodes when they time comes for them to grow their environments, as well.
Single node configurations can replicate with other single node configurations (making a two node configuration possible in some ways) as well as with high availability cluster configurations making them very well suited to remote offices.
Pricing: An official price list is not available yet, but the single node configuration is priced as the same as the per node prices of the existing cluster configurations. The single node configuration is only an update to our software to allow for single node operation and not new hardware, so the single nodes are the same as individual nodes in a cluster. The single node configuration, therefore, starts at just 33% the price of our normal starting price for a three node cluster.
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Will end-users be able to grow slowly? IE: Grow from one node to 2... and then eventually buy a third?
or would it be a jump straight from 1 node to 3 nodes?
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@dafyre you could run 2 single nodes and have them failover manually using the replication, but for high availability in a single cluster, it would need to go from 1 to 3 currently.
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@dafyre said in Introducing the Single Node Scale HC3 Appliance:
Will end-users be able to grow slowly? IE: Grow from one node to 2... and then eventually buy a third?
or would it be a jump straight from 1 node to 3 nodes?
Unfortunately at this time there is no means of growing from one to two. The jump is from one to three and one node at a time from then on. This is because of the need of a witness to avoid split brain of the cluster. One node avoids this by not having high availabilty, three and more nodes handle this by always having a witness. At two nodes there are complications that do not exist otherwise. So at this time, there is no two node option.
Except, of course, if you were in a situation where two nodes was useful through replication. That works with two nodes.
