Edge Computing Redefined for Mid-Market and MSPs
Scott Loughmiller opens by reframing edge computing as any deployment outside traditional data centers — including mid-market on-premises infrastructure and MSP customer sites. He positions Scale Computing's platform vision as making application deployment and management at the edge as easy as in the cloud. The presentation uses two fictional customer scenarios to demonstrate roadmap features: a mid-market manufacturing company migrating from a legacy hypervisor and a nationwide retail pharmacy chain deploying 1,000 locations. This narrative approach illustrates how Scale Computing addresses real-world challenges faced by organizations forced to migrate due to hypervisor market consolidation.
Zero-Touch Provisioning and Hardware Flexibility
The roadmap emphasizes deployment automation through enhanced zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) capabilities in Fleet Manager. New features include improved error handling that allows administrators to correct configuration mistakes without manual intervention, and support for partner-sourced hardware through an authorized imaging program. Scale Computing now offers full coverage on Supermicro, Dell, and Lenovo platforms, allowing partners to leverage existing vendor relationships and rebate programs. The retail pharmacy scenario demonstrates how ZTP enabled deployment of four clusters per weekday for a year, with Terraform automation handling application deployment and validation in a staging warehouse before shipment to stores.
Veeam Integration and Migration Support
A major announcement is full Veeam Backup & Replication integration with agentless support for HyperCore, launching in Veeam 12.3.3 and 13.0.1 by year-end. This integration serves dual purposes: enabling seamless migration from legacy hypervisors by restoring existing Veeam backups directly to HyperCore clusters, and providing ongoing data protection with full Veeam feature support. The manufacturing company scenario illustrates using Veeam to migrate workloads from the acquired hypervisor platform while maintaining familiar backup workflows. This addresses a critical pain point for organizations seeking alternatives to legacy platforms without disrupting established data protection strategies.
Fleet Management and Automation Capabilities
Scale Computing is expanding Fleet Manager with VM-level metrics, a comprehensive API, and node lifecycle management. The new Fleet Manager API enables integration with ServiceNow for automated case management and AI-assisted capacity planning through utilization monitoring. VM metrics provide visibility into resource consumption across thousands of clusters, while console paste functionality simplifies credential management. Node lifecycle management (launching in 9.6) allows non-disruptive addition and removal of nodes directly from the UI, eliminating support calls. The retail scenario demonstrates using the API to aggregate conditions across 1,000 sites and predict resource exhaustion, while the manufacturing example shows adding GPU-enabled nodes to support AI workloads.
Project Kraken and GPU Support
Project Kraken introduces application delivery and management across entire fleets through manifest-based deployment. Administrators can deploy applications to multiple clusters simultaneously with infrastructure-as-code consistency, including VMs, containers, configurations, and scripts. The retail pharmacy scenario shows deploying a computer vision application to 1,000 stores with a single click, with Fleet Manager handling media distribution and VM provisioning remotely. GPU support is becoming a first-class feature, with live migration support coming in Q3 and full mixing of GPU and non-GPU nodes following. New hardware includes refreshed HE150 platforms, the HE250 from SimplyNUC, and the Lenovo SE100 — the first hyperconverged infrastructure certified on this platform, fitting three nodes in 1U.
