Scale Computing delivers hyperconverged solution to South Africa market with Axiz partnership

Processing power donated to international charities using a demonstration cluster involving the Scale appliance

Scale Computing, a market leader in hyperconverged solutions, today announced a partnership with leading South African IT infrastructure and software distributor Axiz. The distributor will be reselling the Scale HC3 platform, combined with Lenovo servers, to create a simple to use and easy to deploy hyperconverged solution for the midmarket. Through this new relationship, Axiz will become part of the Scale Partner Community which provides enablement, tools and a range of incentives, alongside the opportunity to work closely with the Scale team on joint marketing activities.

Rather than treat storage, servers, virtualisation, and management as different data centre silos, the combined Scale Computing and Lenovo solution brings them together in one comprehensive system, automating overall management. With no extra virtualisation software to license and no external storage to buy, the solution offers lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplifies the infrastructure needed to keep applications running.
With an extensive presence in South Africa and offices in strategic countries in southern and eastern Africa, Axiz carries a comprehensive range of products from over 50 of the world's leading IT brands. To kick-start the roll out of this new HC solution, the South African distributor has invested in demonstration clusters at its head office in Gauteng to highlight the benefits of Scale Computing's solution to partners and customers.

When the demonstration cluster is not being used commercially, the processing power is donated to numerous charities through www.worldcommunity.org. These include:

The Microbiome Immunity Project: The human microbiome is a collection of all of the bacteria that live inside our bodies and all of the genes they have. The 30 trillion bacteria that live in our own microbiome, are usually beneficial to humans but some are linked to diseases such as Type1 diabetes and Crohn's disease which are becoming more common across the globe.
Smash Childhood Cancer: Approximately 300,000 children globally are diagnosed with cancer every year and 80,000 die of the disease. The Smash Childhood Cancer project is an international team of researchers looking for drug candidates to treat childhood cancers.
Help Stop TB: Researchers from the University of Nottingham are partnering with the World Community Grid to take a close look at the bacteria that cause this deadly infectious disease to develop more effective treatments.
FightAIDS@Home Phase 1 and 2: This project is searching for drugs that can disable a key step in the lifecycle of the HIV virus and stop the onset of AIDS.

"The combined Scale and Lenovo solution is ideal for us for two reasons. Firstly, many of our customers are looking for scalability, high performance and simplified management, but are concerned about growing IT costs. Our HC3 solution provides the same capabilities as a data centre but at a reduced cost," Patrick Reeves, Managing Executive, at Axiz commented. "Secondly, and something that we are extremely proud of is, we currently have a cluster in place and when the solution is not being used, we donate the processing power to worthy international charities. This ensures that not only is the appliance helping our customers but we can contribute meaningfully to charities with IT resources, something that would normally cost a charity a lot of money."

Johan Pellicaan, MD & VP EMEA at Scale Computing stated: "We are pleased to extend our presence in South Africa through our partner Axiz. The company plays an important role in our expansion strategy and we are excited to be working with them in offering a hyperconverged solution to customers in the region. They have extensive expertise and the commitment to bring this solution to customers in the region, and uniquely are in a great position to donate processing power to numerous global charities."

The Lenovo and Scale Computing-based solution can start with a single node appliance for remote offices or for specific deployments, and can scale to multi-node cluster deployments, depending on the nature of the application and size of the company.

About Axiz
Axiz is South Africa's leading IT infrastructure and software distributor with a number of offices across South Africa, as well as a presence in Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Axiz has become a highly valued channel for its vendors and customers, showing the passion and commitment necessary to maintaining the highest levels of service and customer satisfaction. Axiz provides end-to-end innovative technology and professional solutions to its reseller base with a product portfolio consisting of over 50 of the world's leading IT brands and a team geared to drive adoption of next generation technologies. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the listed IT group, Alviva Holdings.

About Scale Computing
Scale Computing integrates storage, servers and virtualisation software into an all-in-one appliance-based system that is scalable, self-healing, and as easy to manage as a single server. Using industry standard components, the HC3 appliances install in under an hour, and can be expanded and upgraded with no downtime. High availability insulates the user from any disk or server failure and a unified management capability driven by the patented HyperCore Software™, efficiently integrates all functionality. The result is a data center solution that reduces operational complexity, allows a faster response to business issues, and dramatically reduces costs.

For more information, interested parties may contact Axiz at http://www.axiz.com or contact Scale Computing via the company's website at http://www.scalecomputing.com.


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