SANsymphony vs. Scale Computing Platform

Now that you have virtualized your server's CPU and memory resources, you should look to do the same for your storage. Separation of hardware and software has many added benefits not only for CPUs and memory but for storage as well. Without this solution, we would not have been able to afford black-box type SANs at every location. This allowed us to virtualize over 90% of the server environment saving costs and power consumption/cooling and provides all the features costly black-box SANs, including true-HA (which most SAN vendors don't have). Migration from variant SAN storage and using mixed back-end storage solutions is as easier than ever before because the storage being virtualized.

Incentivized

I believe Scale Computing Platform shines in the small enterprise environment and it would work well in a medium/edge environment enterprise environment. Based on my experience with VMWare, I believe Scale Computing Platform's solution would struggle to meet the needs of a larger enterprise that relies on more robust, industry standardized system integrations for automation and management. The Acronis backup solution is robust, but Veeam is the industry standard for a reason.

Incentivized

• Fast pools should go to your most used data, and not static files.
• Redundancy is a must for all aspects of our IT jobs. Who wants to explain when there's no data?
• Works on Windows server 2012/2016 much better. Solid stability.

• Snapshots are lean and fast, so restore time is simply amazing. When you don't have time to wait after a crypto attack to restore, I have found nothing faster!
• Clients can never fully know their growth for years to come, and sometimes it is only a year after the original install. This is no problem we can build on to the system like Lego blocks. Just simply adding a node or two and there is no downtime!
• There are many functions that can be done while servers are running that help to maintain the most uptime, as an example disk size on the primary disk can be expanded without shutting down the server.

Incentivized

• Our needs are very small when compared to what this product can do. We don't use all of what it is capable of doing. Honestly, I have no cons.

Incentivized

• We have used Scale for just under a year and have not yet noticed any area that needs improvement.
• I actually joked with my Scale rep that the system is so easy to manage and foolproof that we don't login to the console often enough and can never remember the password

Incentivized

I'm currently in the process of renewing my support.

Incentivized

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

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

In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!

Incentivized

The support team deserves major props for how cordial and professional they were with our implementation. We were assigned a project manager and engineer. Everything was scheduled with our kick-off call, and our engineer got us up and running in no time.

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

DataCore is far easier to manage as well as deal with when it comes to hardware (as DataCore works with any hardware). It also seems way more affordable.

Incentivized

At the end of the day, and in the environment we are in, Scale just fits the bill, both price-wise and functionality-wise. Upgrading our VM environment was always a week-long process, now, it is a twenty-minute process, implementing, converting VMs, and rolling everything over to Scale was completed in less than a week's time, and that included training.

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

• More uptime - Typical SANs have redundant controllers, redundant power supply's and can make the drives redundant by leveraging RAID-0, 5, 6, and 10. The claim to be HA but they are not. That is because if I spay water all over them or catch the SAN on fire, the storage will go down. With DataCore's solution we have identical systems (maybe even at different datacenters connected with long-haul-fiber) including duplicate storage. So one side of the solution can totally be taken offline by water, fire, etc. and the other side will remain up providing true-HA storage. Because of this, we can upgrade the SANs during the day and still keep storage services running (zero-downtime).
• Lower Costs - Ability to use 3rd party hardware which lowers the costs, not only for the initial investment but as storage capacity grows.
• All the features one can want - High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Asynchronous and Synchronous mirroring/replication, snap-shotting, continues data protection, deduplication, storage reporting, trending with graphs, centralized console for easier management and many more.

Incentivized

• We have a huge ROI because of saving on manpower for setup, maintenance, administration, updates, extensions, support calls and also our backup strategy.
• Saving on administration time is at least 99% compared to the market leader.
• The Hypervisor cluster can be extended without any planning, downtime and about 30 min of setup time.
• Very good addition to our backup strategy. We generally don't need to restore from disk/tape, but just go back in time to a snapshot or mount any snapshot from any disk from any server to any other server to check for deleted files, etc.
• Support calls are hassle-free, fast and have no overhead of collection logs or dealing with first-level support, etc.

Incentivized