Azure Virtual Machines vs. Scale Computing Platform

If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.

Incentivized

Scale is best suited to environments that do not have excessive external or proprietary peripherals. Integrating with tape drive backups or robot tape libraries can be problematic. The most effective use of Scale systems is for companies running multiple instances of the same operating system. The hypervisor's code/file-sharing nature does an excellent job managing new instances while keeping the increase in storage to a minimum.

• When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
• When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
• Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
• When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.

Incentivized

• Simplicity - I do not have to create storage buckets or micromanage anything.
• Efficiency - Lower power use since moving to a hyperconverged environment.
• Scalability - Adding additional hardware is easy, and increasing things like the amount of RAM or number of cores is easy.

Incentivized

• Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
• The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
• As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.

Incentivized

• Dedicated Lights-Out Solution for low-end systems
• Ability to replace smaller storage drives with larger ones, rather than requiring the addition of an entire node for storage increases
• Different UI views for VMs: ability to minimize certain groups and have that persist through log-ins

Since I have had no issues with downtime; easier management of my cluster and the ability to lower the number of devices in my Infrastructure, I will gladly renew my support contract with Scale Computing HC3 and upgrade my equipment with them when it comes time for it.

Incentivized

Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.

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Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.

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Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.

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I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Incentivized

They are very knowledgeable about their own products and hardware addressing my concerns or issues very quickly and on the first contact. Calls concerning VMware migrations and Acronis backup took a little more time for more complicated issues, but the Scale Computing Platform techs were diligent to stay on top of issues until they were resolved. Most of my issues have been with the initial setup/migration.

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I did not do in-person training.

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Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.

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The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.

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Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.

Incentivized

We previously used Microsoft Hyper V and VMWare and, before that, a room for single-purpose servers. My satisfaction with Scale is because it is a more straightforward product to install and use; it has incredible speed and reliability. In the past, getting support from Microsoft was labor intensive, and with VMWare, there was a language accent barrier.

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HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.

Incentivized

• It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
• Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
• The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs

Incentivized

• With the high cost of the leading competitor the savings starts day one and saves every year after.
• Scale can be administered by a tier one technician so cost of labor is reduced.
• If there is a problem like a cyber attack, the savings kick in with the least amount of downtime.

Incentivized