Scale Computing HC3 Reviews

We are currently using the hybrid (part flash, part HDD) version of the HC3 appliance in a 3 node cluster. We replaced 5 physical HP Proliant servers running Hyper-V. We are now running most of our business-critical servers on a high performing hyper-converged appliance at a fraction of the cost of some of the other vendors we looked at. While cost was a big reason we purchased, the biggest reason was that we didn't feel like we were being oversold on features that we didn't need or that didn't matter to us. We felt that Scale Computing really catered to the SMB, and we were the customers that mattered. The feature set provided us everything we need, and very little we don't. The sales team encouraged us to plan for the future, but not overbuy. What a refreshing sales process. We ended up purchasing what we need, not what a Fortune 500 company needs.

We run multiple SQL and other database servers on the scale and have been able to easily provision additional hardware as required. We run nearly all of our business-critical application servers on the HC3 as well. Performance and uptime have improved significantly.

We use Scale Computing in our North America location. It addresses the problems and limitations of using VMware. Scale Computing allows for a better set up of virtual server environments.

One of the many applications we run on Scale is our companies' ERP system. It requires a lot of memory and disk space to run, but it handles it with no problems.

Scale is being used as the primary virtualization platform running all production VMs as well as a replication endpoint for DR in a data center. We run all server VMs on the Scale platform and then have a snapshot schedule that replicates them offsite to a datacenter for disaster recovery purposes.

We currently run an Inventory Management system for a manufacturing company on the Scale platform. It is literally the life blood of the company as everyone in the company uses it to track their product from start to finish. This particular application releases monthly updates and Scale has been an excellent way for use to test deployment of updates and move them into production.

Scale devices will replace our internal VMWARE/SAN/HPE environment at corporate and our DR site. Additionally, we will be using it to power 25 (50%) of our bigger retail stores. If this is successful and we see enough ROI we will implement a smaller version of the solution Scale is working on in the rest of the 25 retail stores. I expect this will increase up-time to almost 100% and allow upgrades and changes without issue. Additionally, these units will assist during power events as they have great redundancy.

We initially purchased Scale H3 to shrink our physical footprint on servers and allow for affordable expansion across the entire district. This has allowed us to to lower maintenance costs as well as increase our server count to more evenly disperse services resulting in faster operations. We have also been able to create a reliable and ultra fast disaster recovery plan will little to no data loss.

Scale allowed us to load balance our services. Rather than have one application server supplying antivirus protection, print services, and windows updates I now have three separate VMs that run more efficient resulting in faster service.

We have replaced most of our physical servers with virtual machines running on 2 Scale systems in two locations. We will be adding a third in the next year. We run domain controllers, file servers, email server and application servers virtually. We have a DR solution by using the remote connections. Additionally we use the snapshots to protect against malware/ransomware attacks.

The first systems that I created on the HC3 clusters was a backup server and a file server. We were able to quickly get the data transferred and now have several layers of protection from lost, corrupted or maliciously attacked files. Since then we have added several domain controllers at each location and other business critical application servers. Eventually I plan to have 90% of my servers running as VMs on the Scale systems.

HC3 replaced our organization's single server allowing for multiple servers to be built and maintained for separate uses. Going from a single server to nine has allowed Intervine to grow while protecting resources, increasing security, and streamlining processes. With ease of duplication, server buildout, and scaling, Scale has been instrumental in our organization.

For security reasons I rather not list applications we are running but rest assured our entire organization is on Scale. From AD, DNS, Fileservers, to security software we use Scale for everything and without issue. I was worried that some of our applications would not work on Scale but I have never had an issue and look forward to a long partnership.

In a multi-site, highly secure industrial control environment, we needed a solution that would simplify administration, provide test/development cloning capability, N+1 redundancy, and allow for host replication between sites for disaster recovery. Scale's HC3 delivered everything as promised and the solution truly is easy enough for a non-system administrator to manage on a day-to-day basis. Scale is an absolute home run for SCADA/ICS infrastructure, and offers unprecedented flexibility, especially if upgrading from a non-virtualized infrastructure.

Most SCADA vendors are behind the times in terms of utilizing modern infrastructure. If your application runs on common Windows or Linux distributions, you can absolutely run them on HC3. Scale certifies about two dozen operating systems on the HC3 platform, ensuring compatibility and supportability. If the SCADA solution utilizes software replication, there are architectural decisions that should be made regarding how to design for true DR, but the beauty of HC3 is its flexibility -- you can use the built-in software replication, let HC3 replicate guest VMs, or use a combination of those two approaches, like we do.

We use Scale Computing's HC3 servers for running our entire IT and OT Operations. We are always looking for improvements in the IT Infrastructure and to efficiently use our IT Resources. Scale computing provides us with a ton of great benefits. We reduced our foot print in the server room by half which helped in reduced power consumption. We were using a virtualization solution from a big name company and we found ourselves inundated with managing performance, licensing, and increasing maintenance. As we had three different vendors to deal with every time we had an issue on the system, it made it very difficult to troubleshoot and resolve problems. Scale computing was our answer to consolidate services, run servers more efficiently and reduced or eliminated daily maintenance tasks.

We run applications which range from Identity Management, Physical Security, Databases and resource intense servers. We have run every type of scenario and Scale has so far handled them very well. We use a backup replication host which is replicating a 3 node solution and we have not seen any degradation of performance. The critical application that run on the solutions are SCM, ERP Systems, HR Systems to name a few. On the Operational Technology side, we run some of the reporting and monitoring servers for utilities etc.

Scale HC3 is being used across the entire organization for all our server needs. It is housing all our VMs as well as all of our network storage. It has solved the issues with VMWare licensing, an outdated SAN as well as multiple host servers required to properly run a VMWare environment.

We run everything on our Scale solution. This includes a SQL server for our ERP software, multiple licensing applications as well as file servers and domain controllers. I even have some desktops set up for VPN purposes. Everything works flawlessly. I can't imagine a scenario where Scale wouldn't meet our needs.

We replaced our physical servers with the Scale HC3 solution at all three plants in the US. We host everything from file and print services to our ERP system and database on them. We also host a terminal server and a variety of other server infrastructure on the HC3 Cluster. Disaster recovery and business continuity are also completely managed on three clusters around our organization reducing the need for expensive and hard to manage DR solutions. Management and cost of operation of all these resources have been drastically simplified by this technology. The web management interface is simple and easy to use, yet extremely powerful and comprehensive. Because the Scale nodes have such a small 1-U footprint, we've found cooling and energy consumption has also been minimized.

Our ERP system runs on our Scale environment and it's flawless. Scale's data prioritization algorithm allows us to assign solid-state storage to that application so it performs with lightning-like speed.

Our AutoDesk Vault application has synchronized instances across two of our locations allowing local copies of our design models for our drafting and engineering teams to have instant access to.

We replicate our VMs to the nodes at the other plants so we get offsite backups which can be instantly stood up to verify their content or recover files.

The Scale Computing HC3 solution is used across the entire organization. It replaced over 50U of traditional hardware down to 3U. Saving us a lot of aggravation dealing with multiple third party vendors for support and maintenance agreements, while simplifying our own internal support and maintenance of over 50 Virtual machines. The savings was so significant, that we realized an 18 month ROI and saved tremendously on energy costs. Additionally, a battery backup unit now provides us with over 7 hours of backup power vs. 45 minutes previously.

We run a SQL based document management system from OpenText that manages close to 30TB of documents. Moving to Scale Computing HC3 gave users much faster search and fetch times by a factor of 5. We run 4 Exchange Servers along with 40 other application servers, which have all run seamlessly in the last two years. The hypervisor (KVM) allowed us to import old and new servers that are critical to our business. We converted many standalone servers to consolidate our physical footprint, for better management and performance.

We implemented Scale clusters in both of our offices as a replacement for the prior HyperV-Based VM infrastructure. We utilize Scale's built-in snapshot and replication technology to provide VM-level backup & DR protection. All of our primary storage is now managed as part of the Scale environment. Scale integrates VM operations, management, and protection into a unified system that provides more capability at lower cost than the multi-vendor collection of products we used previously.

Our environment is 100% virtualized and entirely on Scale Computing. This includes Main file servers; Active Directory domain controllers, SQL servers; speech processing systems; print servers; security management servers; e-discovery hosts; RDS server farms; legal application servers. Our experience is that, no matter what we ask Scale to do, it does it very well. We P2V moved our primary file server on to the Scale cluster with zero issues.

Scale HC3 has replaced our traditional stack of servers, storage, and networking for our entire organization. We have two clusters, a one node, and a three node. Implementation of HC3 reduced our server refresh cost by 40% and provided a flexible architecture where, going forward, we can add or replace nodes on a planned periodic basis rather than monolithic refreshes every four years. The ease of deployment and maintenance are a significant benefit to our small organization.

Primary loads in our environment are databases (MS SQL and Postgress) as well as file and document management. These all have high demand and IO activity and the platform has responded well to these demands.

We use Scale across the whole organization - a trend started by our head office in Germany to fully virtualize our entire server-based network.

The biggest change for us (on the engineering side) was the consolidation of our Siemens TeamCenter servers. We were able to go from 4 physical machines down to a Scale HC3 cluster of 3 nodes (3 physical machines), and on top of that, I am able to run several other servers from this cluster all without affecting the overall performance of TeamCenter. This has allowed us to ultimately turn off 11 old single-host hardware servers in place of our overall two clusters of 3 nodes each (totaling 6 physical machines). The cost savings in power alone has been pretty massive.

Here at the City of Havre de Grace we have recently made the switch to Scale and couldn't be happier. This change was made from a performance need and so far Scale has passed that with flying colors. The speed has significantly improved and from a manager of the software, it is extremely user-friendly. When we made the change we made sure that Scale was going to take over our entire organization and it's done that and then some. Finally, I will say that for whatever problems we may have ran into with other brands we have yet to have any issues with Scale and could not be happier.

At the City of Havre de Grace our cluster on Scale host many of our servers/VMs. These servers that were running on our previous server seemed to be a bit slow even laggy on some days. After the switch to Scale, our active directory pops up in a second whereas before it would buffer and take some time.

It is being used across the whole organization. It has simplified our server/networking strategy by eliminating the need for a SAN and other networking equipment. In doing so, it has also improved our reliability and efficiency. This also led to a reduction in cost and downtime.

We run business critical servers and databases on Scale and they perform very well.

Our H3 nodes are serving our entire organization running seven Windows servers including domain controllers, exchange, file server, antivirus, network monitoring, systems management and one Linux server hosting our intranet site.

We were very liberal in our initial resource setup and at just over a year in have not had to make many adjustments. But when I have made them it's so easy. We migrated our Exchange to Scale and a few months later upgraded it without any issues at all. Our domain controllers, file server and utility servers have all functioned perfectly.

It is being used across the whole company and also being used by a sister company. Each company has their own HC3 system in place, and each company uses the other for Disaster Recovery.

We use SQL as the backbone for many core applications whenever the server hard drive fills it only takes minutes to spin up a duplication of the SQL machine with expanded storage.

Our HC3 System is our network workhorse. Our Domain Controllers, File Servers and Database servers are on this system. One major problem that it solves for our team is backups/restorations. Our staff work 24/7 in some cases and the reliability of HC3 System gives us peace of mind. The second is cost, the VMs we deploy are no longer eating up as much power and use much less rack space, not to mention the cost of hardware upkeep and maintenance has also gone down.

As mentioned earlier, we use the HC3 for all our major systems (Domain Servers, SQL, Web hosts, Linux Servers and so on). So any one application detail would not be enough.

We use the Scale platform across multiple service assets. Initially, we implemented Scale for running virtual servers on our ERP system, we quickly realized we were under using it and added multiple virtual machines for other services with the company.

With the Scale platform, we have been able to run through staffed upgrades of our ERP Staten in days. Previously, this process too months because of physical hardware limitations.

We are using Scale to replace our previous storage hardware AND virtualization software. Our HP storage array had reached its end of life (EOL) and was no longer able to be extended under warranty services. Additionally, the physical nodes we used for our VM's and its management were also reaching EOL. With our Scale solution, we are able to migrate all of our VM's and are now beginning to visualizer more of our physical servers.

Currently, we are running Active Directory DC's, file servers, print servers, terminal servers, SQL server, ERM solution, telephone system server, and many others. In fact, the only server I have not been able to move to Scale is my fax server that requires a phone card to be installed into the server itself. Other than that, I have not had anything that has not worked on Scale.

We have replaced our aging physical servers with HC3, and this has allowed us to build servers and desktops to support various workloads. Before Scale, we had a few servers that provided several application functions or services. This did not allow us to perform maintenance in a manner that did not affect several departments at once. Now if one department has an issue, we can work on their problems without affecting any other application or service.

We recently purchased and deployed a cluster to enable replication and DR for the organization. Next, we will deploy a cluster to support virtual desktops and stream applications to our end users enabling better mobility and security.

Scale was a perfect fit for our organization and we can better support our users and their needs easily and efficiently.

Our applications are new and have not been substantially impacted as the Scale HC3 system has been available and up to the tasks we have set before it!!!

We are able to run a lean environment and Scale Computing's HC3 has allowed us to keep our users happy and unaware of any issues that have arisen.

We use our scale systems for virtual machine hosting. It allows redundancy, failover, and DR in a simple, speedy way that we did not get from our Citrix or Windows-based virtual environments.

We have a production environment in the quarrying and construction business. We have expanded from around 1000 employees to over 3000 employees. In that time the number of sites and demand on our infrastructure has also increased. We choose Scale as it allowed us to easily add more nodes, more powerful newer nodes as the business grew. This has been seamless with Scale being on site with us and remotely. I don't think we would have had other solutions out there that would have been as easy to stay ahead of our growing business so easily.

The primary use case for the Scale Computing HC3 platform was for delivery of VDIs for a specific organisational design activity across two disparate companies. There was little integration at that point and the 2 large organisations had legacy environments that it was/still is hard to integrate (because of scale/cost).

The business team re-organisations were large scale and had been under NDA so minimal preparation could be undertaken. The project had already set a budget in advance.

Therefore we needed a quick to deliver, cost effective way of providing the environments, with DR, within each organisation, for use by employees from the other organisation.

To this end we deployed 16 x Lenovo based Scale HC3 appliances, 4 to each of 4 data centres with each pair of data centres belonging to the individual companies. In this way, we hit the timescales, hit the budget and provided a robust solution hosting, in total, circa 1200 VDIs complete with a replicated DR instance

End user compute for key business processes is what we use the platform for, not critical applications themselves.