Scale Computing, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provider, on Tuesday announced the HE500 series of edge appliances, which are part of the vendor’s HC3 family.

The new devices are designed as a fit for companies looking for reliable, easy-to-deploy and affordable infrastructure at the network’s edge. The new edge devices are particularly suitable for distributed environments, such as retail, where there are hundreds or thousands without any IT staff. Scale Computing devices, however, can be found across industries such as health care, education, financial services, manufacturing and government.

Scale Computing’s Dave Demlow

“The HE500 series is designed to set a new entry price point, offering all the same availability, the same full-featured software stack as our existing HC3 product line,” Dave Demlow, vice president, product management and support, told Channel Futures.

Other products in the vendor’s HC3 product line include the HC1000 and HC5000 series, that deliver the maximum HCI functionality.

Comprised of five models, the HE500 series is a set of right-sized HCI appliances that provide enterprise-class features to remote locations for edge computing capabilities with disaster recovery. The HE500 models are easy to deploy, can be managed locally or remotely, and feature self-healing technology for almost instant failover to minimize downtime, the company said.

In fact, Scale Computing suggests that the HE500 series is also an option for disaster recovery infrastructure.

All systems come in a highly available configuration of three nodes. In the three-node configuration, users get the “data center in a box” experience. All five models in the HE500 series are pre-installed with Scale Computing’s HC3 HyperCore Software, that provides an intelligent and automated layer for operations and performance.

The HE500 series is available as either a 1U rack mount or in a tower configuration. Units can be configured with spinning disk, all-flash or a hybrid disk and flash storage option that leverages Scale Computing’s software tiering, with either 32GB or 64GB RAM per appliance. Users also get to choose between 1GbE or 10GbE SFP+ networking interfaces and three different processor options.

The new HCI device is also available in a single node configuration for special use cases.

“For MSPs with customers who have sites running five applications without a lot of data and no IT staff, they can put on the customer’s location high-availability systems at not much more than the cost of a single server to run maybe virtualized applications,” said Demlow.

Customers can mix and match different nodes and scale out, as required. The vendor offers interoperability across all of its systems, including higher end.

Pricing begins $16,000 (MSRP) and the HE500 series is available now.