As Scale Computing Teams With Veeam, Partners Predict Big Wins

‘Now that they have tie-ins and a native integration with Veeam to back up the HyperCore hypervisor, I think it is going to unlock that ecosystem for a lot of customers,’ says Josh Lee, director of sales at Scale Computing partner VirtuIT.

Scale Computing now offers a native integration with Veeam Software—the market leader in data resilience—which has its partners cheering.

“Now that they have tie-ins and a native integration with Veeam to back up the HyperCore hypervisor, I think it is going to unlock that ecosystem for a lot of customers,” said Josh Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT, a national MSP based in Nanuet, N.Y.

Indianapolis-based Scale Computing unveiled the partnership in April. The integration went live Thursday and is now generally available.

With it, Scale Computing said organizations can take full advantage of Veeam’s data protection, ransomware recovery and workload mobility, ensuring business continuity across any environment. Scale Computing said it is designed to meet the needs of environments as diverse as retail branches, factory floors and centralized data centers.

“Veeam is the No. 1 by market share backup software,” Lee told CRN. “Previously, if you talked to a customer about Scale Computing, unless they wanted to put agents on all of their virtual machines your only choice to do hypervisor integration was to use Acronis.”

For a customer who may also be switching from a Broadcom stack to a new Scale Computing offering, often times it was too much change to its environment in too short of a window, he said.

“Now with Scale’s integration with Veeam, it will back up everything. It will automatically deploy proxies. It just makes the entire process of doing data protection much easier if a customer wants to use Veeam and if they’re comfortable using Veeam,” Lee told CRN.

Mark Essayian, president of Lake Forest, Calif.-based KME Systems, a longtime Scale Computing partner, said the collaboration with Veeam is a massive endorsement of Scale Computing’s technology.

“It’s good to see Scale further reinforcing integrations with other market-leading tools,” he said. “They’re showing just how valuable they are and how they play well with the other kids on the block. I do commend them for constantly improving their integrations.”

Essayian said he recently had a customer ask for VMware or Microsoft’s Hyper V. After explaining the benefits of the Scale platform in a call with Scale reps, the customer decided to go with Scale rather than VMware or Hyper V.

“We build a quote, and the guy looks in and he goes, ‘Where’s the rest of it?’ And he laughs,” Essayian said. “Scale is a very easy sell, even before the VMware issue. Wait till the VMware people get their renewal costs. It’s a lot, yes, and it’s so much that it's like customers will consider a wholesale swap-out of gear because while Scale is not cheap, Scale is cost-effective.”

CRN reached out to Broadcom for comment but had not heard back at press time.

VirtuIT only recently started working with Scale Computing and has been won over by the hyperconverged infrastructure provider’s warm welcome and easy on-boarding process.

“We started working with them in the second half of last year, and it’s been really good. They’re an awesome company to work with, but it’s a really good alternative to Broadcom,” Lee told CRN. “We’re not running around doing this on our own. They’ve got a lot of resources from the sales support to the marketing support to the MDF and training. Their on-boarding process is one of the easiest of any of the partners we have worked with.”

Lee said VirtuIT’s customers have seized on the value of the platform and its adaptability to the needs of midmarket companies.

“Their NUC solution is very intriguing because of the size of it,” he said. “In a branch office where you don’t need a data center or a server room, it’s just the little NUC. There’s a lot of value there for end users, especially when you look at what it would have cost to run a VCF [VMware Cloud Foundation] edge or just having to get VCF licenses. A three-node scale cluster, with three to five years of support, might be cheaper than one year of Broadcom licensing costs.”

Scale Computng last week announced that it had been acquired by Austin, Texas-based Acumera in a deal that was funded by private equity heavyweight Oak Tree Capital, a firm founded in 2004 with $209 billion in assets under management.

Scale Computing co-founder Jeff Ready—who remains with the company as a president and CMO—has told CRN that Scale Computing remains 100 percent channel-focused. Scale’s longtime channel chief, Scott Mann, who is now managing director and vice president of Scale Computing International, also remains with the company.

“Jeff [Ready] and Scott [Mann] are pretty damn smart,” Essayian said. “They brought Scale a long way. They’re both good engineers. They both know what they’re doing. The advantage that I see here is that they’re now a bigger company with even stronger finance, with even more ability to go after the Broadcom market.”