Getting a leg up with SCALE.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Scale Platform allowed us to migrate several of our aging bare metal systems to a virtualized environment that allowed us greater redundancy, lower operating costs, and easier management. Despite being a small company, we had many initiatives that required in-house systems for development and production. Additionally, a reluctance to move our services to the cloud prompted us to run the services we needed (email, file services, database services) on systems we personally maintained. The use of Scale provided a more efficient and cost-effective solution for managing the individual group of on-premise systems.
Pros
- Exchange 2019.
- Microsoft Server 2022.
- Spinning up new servers or virtual workstation terminals for quick testing or providing temporary workspaces to transient staff/contractors.
Cons
- Better efficiency of resources use for the purpose of being able provision the systems in the cluster with fewer resources but still support failover to two of the three systems in the cluster.
- Integration with legacy storage and processing resources.
- More robust redundancy with network architecture.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
