Scale brings its modular storage to the UK

Data storage vendor Scale Computing has set up in the UK and has announced its first British customer, City of London. The company, which specialises in selling to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), claimed that its highly modular approach to implementing storage would be attractive to UK companies.

The company's contract with City of London is for the installation of a 12TB storage cluster to store the photographic archive at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA).

Scale Computing's CEO and founder, Jeff Ready said that the company's offerings would help companies plan better for the future. "Most traditional storage architecture require you to forecast what you need and build into it," he said, pointing out that such an approach could be expensive when so much guesswork is involved. Customers need to buy products that can scale, he said. "Other companies do offer systems that do scale they often 6 to 10TB, with our system, companies can scale 500GB at a time."

Ready said that key to Scale's offering was that it offered file and block storage from the same device. "We typically sell to the type of company where one person has to look after all IT administration rather be a storage expert. He would never really thought of things like block and file device so would really benefit from a storage system that can handle both."

The system had been designed to be easy to use by the IT generalist, said Ready, and companies looking to expand didn't need to buy another controller when they bought more storage space, making it even more cost-effective, he added.