Re: Open HCI coming out of stealth
Can't speak to the UK. You guys get shafted on almost all tech. 1$ = 1£ is nonsense, but seems to be prevalent.
And while Scale may not have made huge sense when they first came out, I think revisiting - especially if you aren't in cuckoo 1$ = 1£ land - is worth consideration. But so are organizations like XByte and Servermonkey, especially if you are state-side. It's never simple; there are so many good combinations.
Scale's usefullness is that they are "easy button" simple for SMBs. And SMBs don't always have top teir sysadmins to help them do things. If you already have a top teir sysadmin, and his time is worth nothing, then rolling your own makes sense.
Up past the midmarket, does Scale make sense? I don't know. They don't have too many really high end configurations. They have some decent mid-range stuff now, but no high end stuff.
I live and breathe DIY. Despite this, I am really starting to come around to the whole idea of appliances. Companies don't make money resizing LUNs. So I am really falling in love with organisations that provide infrastructure appliances, so that I can stop fretting about keeping the lights on and start using the technology to hand.
But that's probably just because I'm old and cranky and no longer have the enthusiasm for this sort of thing. When you've fixed a thousand printers and debugged a debunked the iSCSI microbursting myth a few hundred times it all seems so...boring...to roll your own. And I question constantly if my time isn't better spend doing practically anything else.