CRN Exclusive: Scale Computing Teams With Unitrends To Drive Channel Hyper-Convergence Sales

Scale Computing's flagship HC3 hyper-converged platform is getting a shot in the arm with the addition of Unitrends disaster recovery and backup technology for both on-premises and in the cloud.

"This partnership is really all about the channel and our commitment to showing partners how they can make money," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing, in an interview with CRN.

"With our partnership with Google and our Cloudy Unity product, Unitrends does that granular backup and recovery on the cloud basis. If you already have Scale and Cloud Unity, you might be thinking, 'I've got applications running in the cloud on part of my Scale deployment, how do I back those up?' Unitrends is a very good solution for that,'" said Ready. "We're giving partners more tools for their tool chest."

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The Indianapolis-based hyper-converged infrastructure specialist revealed to CRN that it had formed a partnership with backup and continuity vendor Unitrends.

The partnership is targeting enterprises looking for more advanced backup and recovery options by combining HC3 with Unitrends' Recovery Series solution, enabling organizations to better protect and recover their cloud workloads.

Scale's HC3 platform provides infrastructure for virtual workloads, and includes a variety of backup and disaster recovery features including snapshots, replication, failover, failback and cloud disaster recovery-as-a-service. Unitrends is providing additional advanced features such as integrated granular recovery of single data elements, long term retention across on-premises, remote, and cloud-based data, multi-site replication configurations, as well as automated application-level recovery testing.

Ready said although his company does provide disaster recovery and backup tools, Scale is not a "core backup company."

"When you look at competitors to Unitrends like a Veeam and CommVault -- where's the differentiation on the backup side? If backup is part of an overall infrastructure and if you're looking for next generation infrastructure – Scale is a great fit, and now Unitrends spans from that old legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Also, if you move into a hyper-converged infrastructure, like Scale, Unitrends works really well. … So the ability to create the right custom solution for the customer is really what this partnership is all about."

Michael Sheward, chief technology officer at Solutions4ebiz, a Pendleton, Ind.-based solution provider and Scale Computing partner, said the partnership gives the channel a new go-to-market offering in the sales field. "This will definitely be something that customers are interested in," he said. "[Customers] want to protect and recover workloads and they move them to the cloud and hyper-convergence ... These two technologies fit together very well."

In December, Scale formed a partnership with APC by Schneider Electric to create a turnkey hyper-converged solution. Ready said technology partnerships are becoming "a key part" in Scale's go-to-market strategy.

"Hyper-converged infrastructure is the platform that's going to run all your infrastructure and all your applications. There's going to be many situations and cases where it's not one size fits all. So being able to build on to that base Scale platform and customize to create the right solution for customer is where all the partnerships lie," said Ready.