Scale Computing on Tuesday said it closed a new round of funding for $12 million to help it continue developing hyperconverged infrastructure, or "datacenter-in-a-box," offerings that integrate server, storage, networking and hypervisor into a single managed system.

With the new Series D round of funding, total funding in Indianapolis, Ind.-based Scale Computing comes to $43 million, said CEO Jeff Ready. The new round of funding will be used to develop its hyperconverged solution technology and launch a new partner program later this year.

Scale Computing, which started as a builder of clustered storage solutions, is one of a handful of vendors developing hyperconverged IT solutions that tightly integrate the server, storage, networking and virtualization technologies into a single appliance. Adding additional nodes expands both the performance and the storage capacity of the infrastructure.

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Other companies in this part of the IT infrastructure business include Westborough, Mass.-based SimpliVity; San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix; and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pivot3.

Ready said hyperconverged solutions differ from more hardware-based converged infrastructure offerings such as the VCE Vblock, the joint EMC-Cisco VSPEX solutions, or the joint NetApp-Cisco FlexPod or ExpressPod solutions in the integration level.

"In the early hardware-based converged infrastructures, when you order a kit, you get the components and a nice manual for putting them together," he said. "With hyperconvergence, there is no storage layer to manage, or no virtualization layer to manage. Customers get one system to manager. There's no buying or managing a SAN. The SAN doesn't exit. It all happens behind the scene."

Scale Computing's hypervisor, which is based on Red Hat's KVM, is buried deep within the company's HC3 appliances so no license is needed for the virtualization layer. "There's no more need for a human to sit there worrying about the virtualization than there is for a human to sit worrying about the processor communicating with the RAM."

The Scale Computing hyperconverged solutions start with a minimum of three HC3 nodes, each of which is a 1U rack-mount appliance, Ready said. A four-node solution can serve about 40 to 50 virtual machines with all the needed storage, networking and hypervisor, all of which runs as a single package. "If you need more compute power, or more storage, plug in more nodes," he said.

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Scale Computing is addressing customers with between 50 and 500 users and with small IT departments consisting of a few people with general IT skills rather than people with specialized server, storage or networking expertise, Scale Computing's Ready said.

"So where radical simplification is confusing to an enterprise, it's well suited to smaller companies," he said.

Pat Conte, executive vice president and general manager for field operations at Scale Computing, said his company's go-to-market strategy relies heavily on solution providers and smaller systems integrators with experience selling solutions to smaller companies in such verticals as local government, education, community banking and manufacturing.

"Partners should also have a significant services revenue," he said. "We don't have a large professional services group. We depend on partners."

Scale Computing currently has about 450 to 500 partners for all its products, which include storage-focused appliances and its HC3 hyperconverged solutions. Conte expects about 20 percent of them to have access to the company's HC3 technology.

PUBLISHED OCT. 23, 2012