New firm ClusterScale is up for business and is trying to take market share from established load-balancing firms like F5 networks in the high end and Barracuda Networks and Kemp Technologies at the lower end of the market.

ClusterScale director and founder Malcolm Turnbull, previously director of loadbalancer.org, said, “based on our experience of appliances, we, along with a lot of other vendors, think it would be better to move to Dell and HP appliances to ensure global support throughout the world.”

The first system is a new evolved version of the loadbalancer.org product – a standard load balancing appliance, with 64-bit hardware running a 64-bit OS. “It’s been tried and tested on many enterprise sites and we’re also offering a hardware RAID option,” said Turnbull.

ClusterScale’s main competitor in the market is F5, which it said had around 50 per cent of the market. “They’re very good, and are an international brand. We’re trying to compete with them, obviously on price and also keep the support local, with engineers on the end of the phone. We think F5 has a 1,001 functions which we think the majority of customers won’t need,” added Turnbull.

Turnbull commented that ClusterScale’s hardware aims to do the 5-6 tasks that customers do need, “very, very fast.”

ClusterScale has two models available, both using Dell PowerEdge hardware, Pegasys and Nemasys. The higher end Nemasys system uses a PowerEdge 1950 model which ClusterScale say can use their own customised Centos 5 based platform or can be run on Red Hat’s Enterprise Li¬nux 5 platform.

ClusterScale offer optional hot swappable RAID on the Nemasys system and claim greater than 2Gbit/s throughput. The systems are available through ClusterScale sales offices or through their distributors and resellers.

In Q2 ClusterScale will release a clustered, mirrored database system for Oracle and MySQL packages.