Red Hat Virtualization (discontinued) vs. Scale Computing Platform vs. StorMagic SvSAN

RHEV is well suited for organizations that need a cost-effective and flexible solution for their environment. As its vendor-independent software, easily install on any type of hardware. RHEV provides a GUI interface to manage the software, which makes the management of the software easier for the end-user. RHEV is best for non-production or less critical applications. RHEV can be easily integrated with other REDHAT software.

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.

The StorMagic SvSAN solution is certainly suitable for two-node architectures where business continuity is required at a reasonable price, with a workload that is not particularly complex. It is not the right solution if you have a virtual environment with a large number of VMs and workloads that require high performance.

• RHV issues/bugs can be reported via Bugzilla to RH support. The service is great and typically responds soon.
• Red Hat distribution integration is seamless as it is integrated into the kernel.
• OpenStack support enables more customized VM templates and network configuration control.

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

• Storage Mirroring
• Low Price
• Easy deploy
• Easy management

• 1- RHVM API is pretty slow, especially after creating a VM it is not possible to retrieve the VM details (i.e VM's MAC Address) fast enough, where we need to place a pause in our Ansible Playbook, make the automation process slow.
• 2- RHV is still using collected to monitor the hypervisors which is deviating from Red Hat policy for other RHEL based applications to use PCP to monitor, which is richer in features.
• 3- It will be great if it is possible to patch the hypervisors using other tools such as satellite and not only via RHVM.
• 4- In the past Red Hat used to present patches in the z release (i.e. 4.3.z), and features in the y release (i.e 4. y), but starting from 4.4 that is mixed together wherein the Z release you get both patches and features, that is not good because that requires a lot of time to test when we patch as it includes features as well.
• 5- Engineering team has to be more reactive when new feature is requested.

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

• Technical support could be improved
• Inadequate performance for complex environments
• Architecture needs a witness

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.

Incentivized

Deploying the solution is fairly simple. A system administrator with basic data centre knowledge can configure the StorMagic SvSAN suite independently by following the guides provided. Troubleshooting is greatly simplified thanks to the features available in the management interface. The dashboard allows you to easily manage the technology thanks to a very intuitive and well-designed interface.

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

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

I did not do in-person training.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

RHEV is an excellent product, includes more features, is less expensive, and has rock solid reliability and is backed with the best Red Hat Support in the industry. RHEV uses KVM under the hood which is used by all the big players in the industry (AWS, Rackspace, etc) to lower their overall costs and improve efficiency and profits and that's why RHEV is an excellent solution!

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.

Incentivized

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

• RHEV has provided a positive ROI as our customers are not experiencing as many outages during maintenances.
• We have not experienced any catastrophic failures as a result of vsphere losing connection to the ntp.
• There has been a level of stability in our environment that was not previously experienced with our previous vendor.

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

• High resiliency of infrastructure
• Respect low budget
• No waste time for management