OUR SOLUTIONS IN ACTION

Scale Computing accelerates customer adoption with Ansible integration

Scale Computing needed a solution that would allow their customers to quickly and remotely deploy applications to multiple sites at once. With the Ansible integration we designed, developed, and continue to support, they efficiently enabled their customers multi-site orchestrations, which in return has accelerated their revenue and customer adoption.



The Client

Scale Computing is a leading company in edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for global customers. The Scale Computing self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects problems in the infrastructure in real time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime even when local IT resources and staff are scarce.

 

The Challenge

A lot of Scale Computing customers have autonomous clusters of IT infrastructure, highly distributed in, for example, thousands of retail stores or ships that may be out at sea, with limited or no connectivity, for weeks or months at a time, all without any IT personnel on-site. They need public cloud-like abilities to quickly and remotely deploy new applications to thousands of sites at once and have it up and running in months as opposed to what used to be a multi-year process. Scale Computing decided to help clients solve this challenge by integrating their product with Ansible.

The Solution

Scale Computing already had a Rest API interface for their product that let their customers automate one site at a time, but it fell short when they wanted to do declarative state-based configuration of all sites at once. They decided that an Ansible Collection to wrap around their Rest API was the best solution, but they quickly realized that building a quality Ansible Collection themselves is a much bigger project than they wanted to tackle internally, so they partnered with XLAB.

“As a company, we didn’t want to invest internally in becoming Ansible experts, which takes time and skills. Partnering with XLAB has really met that need. I found somebody that I’m confident hasthe right expertise and can do this better, faster, cheaper than we can do it internally,” says Dave Demlow, Vice President of product strategy at Scale Computing.

 

The Result

XLAB delivered a complete solution, including the collection, documentation, continuous testing, and support.

High-quality collection with full documentation and support

In addition to high-quality integration, XLAB delivers complete documentation, provides built-in integration testing, which means everything is automatically and continuously tested with updates, and offers ongoing support. “If we do find issues with the existing collection, we have access to XLAB to address any potential defects or enhancements and quickly address those. The turnaround time has really been amazing,” says Dave.

New business, accelerated revenue, and customer adoption

Scale Computing is now able to help their customers turn multi-year deployments down to a couple of months and assure them they can comfortably deploy and manage their applications across as many systems as needed with demos, making their product much more complete and competitive. “We definitely expect new business and to shorten our customers roll out times. That obviously accelerates our revenue and customer adoption. This integration is key both to winning new business and accelerating the deployment of new systems,” adds Dave.

 

Our way of work

Partnering with XLAB means working with Ansible experts, which relieves our clients from knowing much about Ansible or how is a high-quality collection supposed to look like. They can simply define problems they want to solve without having to know how. We define the user stories together and then design and develop the collection around them. ‘’XLAB team came up with different alternatives, pros, and cons, and then ultimately worked with us to agree on the right solution. The team has been extremely knowledgeable, flexible, and reactive. They advised us on what the collection should do, how to properly structure it, how to make it best to integrate with Ansible, what the expectations of the Ansible community are, as well as advised us on subjects like Red Hat Certification that we had no experience with,’’ says Dave.