Rescale Launches ScaleX Enterprise, Targets IT Chiefs

Rescale introduces ScaleX Enterprise, designed to attract the IT crowd.

San Francisco-headquartered Rescale, which provides on-demand software-hardware combo platform for simulation, is launching a new product, developed with the IT crowd in mind. The new offering, dubbed ScaleX Enterprise, is described as "a unified enterprise simulation platform and a powerful administrative portal, along with direct integrations and management of on-premise HPC resources, schedulers, and software licenses."

Joris Port, Rescale's founder and CEO, pointed out, "The portal in ScaleX Enterprise lets an IT person decide when to buy additional licenses, when to add a server, designate access to different users and groups, and manage budgets."

The product hibernated in R&D for two years, Joris revealed. The time was used to make the product easy to integrate with the customers' on-premise resources. Therefore, an enterprise with existing hardware can use ScaleX Enterprise's on-demand cloud resources in conjunction with on-premise high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

"To do that, we had to build integration mechanisms to all the major job schedulers," Joris said. "That's how we let IT controls when to send jobs to the cloud, when to go with on-premise hardware."

The cost and usage data reported in ScaleX Enterprise may also help IT administrators decide where cloud is more economic, and where adding another onsite server makes more sense.

Joris explained, "The reality is, companies that are interested in cloud computing will have to transition to it over two-three years. Some have already made the investment in clusters, have been using them for ten years or so. The key here is, ScaleX lets them use their existing HPC hardware and the cloud. They can use the Rescale portal, a single unified platform, to manage both."

Rescale's two other products are ScaleX Pro, designed for engineers; and ScaleX Developer, designed for independent software vendors (ISVs) interested in integration. By packaging its new offering ScaleX Enterprise for the IT crowd, Rescale hopes to pitch its technology directly to the CIOs who usually hold the purse string and decide when to move from on-premise servers to the cloud.

This month, ANSYS also began offering ANSYS Enterprise Cloud, the option to setup and run ANSYS on Amazon Web Services. Currently most simulation software vendors don't offer on-demand HPC; instead, they seek partnership with someone like Rescale to address the needs of customers who want intermittent resources for running simulation. But this will likely change as they began to see the potential for the on-demand marketplace.