Great hyper-converged server solution
We use Scale Computing Platform servers to run our online web application. These servers are easy to update, have reliable performance, …
Starting at $3,300 per node
View PricingOverview
What is Scale Computing Platform?
Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HyperCore software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system…
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
HE151
$3,300
On Premise
per node
HE501
$6,800
On Premise
per node
HC1300
$11,900
On Premise
per node
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.scalecomputing.com/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $3,300 per node
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Scale Computing Platform?
Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HyperCore software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. The vendor says that, using patented HyperCore™ technology, the SC//HyperCore self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and corrects problems in the infrastructure in real-time, enabling applications to achieve maximum uptime even when local IT resources and staff are scarce. The vendor says ease-of-use, high availability, and TCO are key differentiators. The product works for distributed enterprises, global retailers, and SMBs alike.
According to the vendor, its key features and benefits include:
- Install in less than an hour
- Deploy new VMs in minutes
- Built-in Browser-based Management
- Software-defined, hybrid storage system with automated tiering
- Fully integrated, cluster-wide resource utilization and alerts
- Single vendor support experience, no disparate systems to integrate
- Integrated all-in-one appliance
- Scale-out Architecture
- Mix and match new nodes
- Incremental resources improve performance of existing workloads
- Fast and easy to expand, no downtime required
- No additional licensing required
- Start small and grow as your business grows
- No forklift upgrades
Scale Computing Platform Screenshots
Scale Computing Platform Videos
SC//Platform Success Story - Detroit Symphony Orchestra
SC//Platform Success Story - American Foundry Group
SC//Platform Success Story - Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township
Scale Computing Platform Integrations
Scale Computing Platform Competitors
Scale Computing Platform Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Unix |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | Globally |
| Supported Languages | English |
Scale Computing Platform Downloadables
- SC//Platform is a platform for running applications at the edge, with all of the software, hardware, and services needed. Regardless of the user's hardware requirements, the same innovative software, SC//HyperCore, and SC//Fleet Manager help to run infrastructure efficiently at scale
- Scale Computing HyperCore saves resources because its software, servers, and storage are in a fully integrated platform that power infrastructure regardless of the hardware configuration.
- Scale Computing Fleet Manager is a cloud-hosted monitoring and management tool built for hyperconverged edge computing infrastructure at scale. It can be used to monitor and manage an entire fleet of clusters running Scale Computing HyperCore. For IT Managers with multiple clusters, maintenance time can be reduced.
- This document describes the technology, concepts and operating theory behind the Scale Computing HyperCore OS that powers it, including the SCRIBE (Scale Computing Reliable Independent Block Engine) storage layer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scale Computing Platform starts at $3300.
VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for Scale Computing Platform.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Scale Computing Platform are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Scale Computing Platform Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 20% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 70% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 10% |
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(338)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(201-225 of 234)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 06, 2017
Scale Computing HC3 Review
I used it for hosting small critical servers for a production environment. It is not used by other departments. We had a cooling problem back then in our data center and Scale Computing has a small footprint and generates less heat compared to Dell servers.
- Easy to create VM and install OS.
- Storage is already clustered and ready to be used.
- Excellent support tools. I email the problem and they take it from there.
- Major firmware upgrade may require shutting down all VMs.
- Backup not supported by Netbackup.
December 06, 2017
General Cluster
The majority of the servers within the client's company have been consolidated and run off of a four-node cluster. This solves concerns with redundancy and overall reliability. Windows Server clusters tend to be less reliable when it comes to load balancing, which can often lead to performance issues. The Scale cluster handles these tasks with ease.
- The cluster is easily expandable by adding additional nodes. This can potentially keeps costs down by allowing you to increase the performance potential of your existing cluster.
- Managing and controlling virtual machines is very straightforward and convenient from the browser-based control panel.
- Creating and restoring snapshots is very easy, making it much less stressful to make major changes to VMs.
- I honestly can't think of any cons off the top of my head. I've been fairly impressed with this product.
September 28, 2017
How Scale tipped the Scales for us
Scale Computing HC3 is our main virtualization platform. It is our first endeavor in the hyper-converged space and we could not be happier. Absolutely every aspect of our dealing with Scale has been top notch! They are custom tailored to SMBs and really get what it is we need from a vendor in regards to upfront sales, purchasing, implementation, and support.
- Sales
- Implementation
- Support
- Uh.... Logo?
We use Scale for not only our own infrastructure but our customers and in our data center. Scale provides the perfect 'pay as you grow' approach with IT for our clients. We also use it to support our clients in the data center as a quick off-site restore platform when disaster strikes.
- The true pioneers of hyper-convergence. If you are evaluating H/C, or are planning on deploying H/C, explore all the solutions out there, and you will find that Scale is the only one that is doing H/C at the base level, the way it should be. Products like Cisco's and others are add ons or afterthoughts and are not much different or just re-worded UCS models.
- The "Pay as you Grow" model afforded by Scale is the future of IT. Why would you EVER buy significantly more computing resources than you need for the very short term? Scale gives you the ability to tighten your capacity planning to meet the fiduciary responsibility modern IT demands.
- They push third party migration software, that is nearly 100% useless. In the 5 different cases we have tried to use it, we have needed significant tech support and they have not been able to even get the program to work outside of a lab environment. This is not a reflection on Scale other than they push this expensive software that they KNOW 100% doesn't work.
- We have experienced significant failure rate from the single node, noncluster servers. One device we have had to replace 2 times (we are on the 3rd one) in a month.
August 11, 2017
ScaleComputing... The mother of all VMs!
Scale Computing is used throughout our entire company. With HC3 simplifying our lives, we are able to maintain 30+ servers, for 5+ companies, and still keep our head on our shoulders! Thank you, Scale.
- Reliably support large infrastructures
- Operating in rough environments
- Creating, managing servers
- Display RAM usage per Virtual Server from the Scale Dashboard to easily identify Servers that need extra memory
- Support for Chrome Browser when using the web-based console (So far, I can only get it to work reliably when using IE)
- Show more information about DR remote clusters from the Production cluster
June 26, 2017
HC3, a small business hyper-converged solution.
Our Scale HC3 cluster is our main server unit for our company. It hosts almost all of our network services, including AD, FTP, IIS (Website), file sharing and more. The biggest business problems that it addresses are, since we don't have a dedicated IT team, the simplicity to manage everything is great, and offsite replication is a breeze. I don't have to worry about losing any critical data.
- Setting up a cluster is very simple. The interface is intuitive and does not require being a system expert to run.
- Managing VMs and settings is easy. An admin just needs to login to one of the local nodes, and they have access to view status, setting, and even remote into all installed VMs.
- Redundancy. In the HC3 setup, there are three nodes that connect through a back plane. If one node goes down, it's simple to spin up a lost VM on another node to continue running business.
- It does not offer the same level of logical networking, like that of VMware.
- We have had issues with some software not being able to activate because of the virtual environment.
- We have to run a separate hardware device for network license dongles.
Scale Computing is used by us for both primary production workloads and mission critical testlab infrastructure workloads. We have a cluster at a co-location facility whose purpose is to host websites, a virtualized file server, some e-mail servers, a few databases and some VDI instances. These are the workloads upon which our small business depends.
One of the services we offer our customers is Testlab as a Service. We do everything from reviews for technology magazines to full tear-down beta testing. Accomplishing anything remotely like efficiency and profitability requires that a great deal of the testlab's digital infrastructure be rock solid. This includes domain controllers, e-mail servers, databases, monitoring software and much, much more.
We also use a Scale Computing SNAC node (https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2016/11/30/scale-computing-single-node-appliance-review.as...) to back up our workloads.
One of the services we offer our customers is Testlab as a Service. We do everything from reviews for technology magazines to full tear-down beta testing. Accomplishing anything remotely like efficiency and profitability requires that a great deal of the testlab's digital infrastructure be rock solid. This includes domain controllers, e-mail servers, databases, monitoring software and much, much more.
We also use a Scale Computing SNAC node (https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2016/11/30/scale-computing-single-node-appliance-review.as...) to back up our workloads.
- Scale is reliable. Drives can fail. Nodes can fail. All sorts of weird things can happen, but data doesn't get lost.
- Scale support is fantastic. I call them "Datacenter Butlers" because they take a lot of the miserable scut work off of plate. I used to constantly put out fires just to keep things running smoothly. Now, whenever there's a problem, Scale support likely knows about it before I do, and will fix most of it for me.
- Speed. Scale isn't the fastest on the market, but they also cost a fraction of the highest end gear out there. It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare, for example, a hybrid solution using SAS/SATA to EMC's top-end custom all-flash DSSD. That said, dollar for dollar, I would say Scale manages to be the fastest solution amongst their peers.
- Scale pay attention to the little things. They have a robust QA program and an extensive beta testing program. They get industry experts to bang on their latest and greatest before it hits the streets and it shows. Scale is the opposite of the current tech trend to push out alpha-level software as generally available and then patch things according to the pyramid of screaming.
- Scale needs a new UI to be able to handle more than 500 VMs in a single cluster.
- Scale needs a multi-cluster management UI.
- Scale needs a full private cloud offering with a self-service portal, template and recipe marketplace and fully integrated configuration management.
Due to the success of the first scale cluster installation and the ease of use and administration, we actually have two different dedicated clusters. One runs the business servers and daily operations, the other runs the core of the refinery operation servers. The Scale Platform streamlined how we handled VMs in our company. Previously there was a lot of mismatched hardware, VMWare, Hyper-V, and dedicated hardware servers. The backup solution and redundancy started becoming an issue along with heat load and just sheer hardware management. The stress of having critical 24/7 process servers running on mismatched hardware was a daily stress. Scale has removed all of that and it really does just work. Plain and simple.
- Super simplified interface. I like to tinker around like any true IT minded person, but I don't have the time to learn all the details on all new systems we implement. I was up and running and fully knew my system in less than a day.
- The tech and setup department knowing we are an oil refinery and rarely, if ever, get a chance for a full shutdown. We got that chance unexpectedly and they literally customized and overnighted a cluster system in 2 days. It took us less than 72 hours from initial contact to have all servers migrated and online in the new cluster. Support engineers worked with us all weekend; they were amazing. They are truly their for their customers, not just a 9-5 company.
- The only thing I can think of, and its to their service or systems, but the cost of some small upgrades seems excessive. a simple ram upgrade to one node was between $1100 - $1500. The actual hardware cost for that is about 25-30% of that.
June 20, 2017
How we benefited from our Scale HC3 cluster
We are currently using our HC3 cluster as our production environment for the corporation. We have migrated all but a handful of systems to the cluster with excellent results. We migrated from a stand alone Hyper-V system to address the fail over problems we were having. The system has performed better than expected, allowing us to migrate additional systems in to the cluster as well as expanding and adding an additional node.
- Fail over and load balancing - Having used a basic Hyper-V system with no clustering and no fail over, this was a selling point to migrate to the HC3.
- Expansion - The process to add an additional node was seamless. Ordered the node, once it arrived gave support a call. Walked thru the process during production hours and was migrating systems over to it within a couple of hours. Could not ask for a simpler process.
- Dashboard - The improvements to the dashboard have been great. The ability to monitor is "real time" the IOPs of the system and individual nodes as well as their processor load have helped us track down issues that might have been missed otherwise.
- The issues that we had early on have been addressed by their support staff. As we have found something that we wanted the system to do they have been very supportive and worked them into their road map. Such as disk usage display and IOPs.
- Multiple User Support - This is one feature that would be nice to get implemented. Single account with admin rights has limited who has access to the system to help support end users. The ability to create user accounts with varying level of access would be beneficial.
June 20, 2017
Love Scale Computing. Great company.
Our organization has applied this as a solution for a client. The client had a significant hardware/platform obsolescence and reliability issue. The Scale Cluster resolved all platform issues and cleaned up a depressingly neglected data closet. Uptime for this client went from sub 90 percent to a consistent 99.999% uptime with a complete turnaround in employee confidence in the network and their network systems.
- Scale Computing HC3 reduces virtualized system management to a minimum set of essential controls. The architecture is a fixed configuration that can be optimized for each site, but is best suited for smaller and medium sized businesses where simplicity, reliability and cost are all factors. HC3 excels in all of these areas.
- Scale Computing HC3 is very quick and easy to implement, easy to migrate in virtual hosts and physical hosts, and easy to expand and re-allocate resources.
- Scale Computing HC3 has great technical support for implementation and ongoing support of your Scale stack. It takes little time to get to a true expert, and they have crossed over into areas that are not directly their own responsibility, such as Microsoft Operating System faults and network configuration issues that are external to their box.
- I would like a little more depth in the virtual machine controls. Maybe that sacrifices simplicity, but it would be nice to have an "expert" mode.
- Better and more evident DR functionality built into the Scale platform. I feel like this is a missed opportunity for Scale.
- Switch to HP Hardware!
June 19, 2017
I scale'd up will you - best decision I made.
HC3 is being used across the organisation. It has allowed us to refresh operating systems, migrate from 32bit OS to 64Bit operating systems. Snapshotting and cloning is very easy and new server VMs are built in rapid time.
- Snapshots - very straightforward and can be scheduled
- Cloning - easy to do from a snapshot
- Creating VMs - is easy
- Performance indicators - which VMs are utilising the most IOPs
- Improved browser support
We are using Scale Computing HC3 as our core server and storage farm. It houses application servers for accounting and PBO services. Scale's intuitive platform and price point allowed us to save thousands of dollars compared to Nutanix and EVO-RAIL. It also facilitated with our efforts meet the requirements needed to obtain our SOC 1 certification.
- Implementation is simple no need to go to hours of training first before you start loading your first VM
- VM will automatically migrate to another Node in case of node failure, no need to configure it its just out of the box
- Snapshots and Cloning VM's are intuitive and fast
- Firmware updates do not require you to bring the whole cluster down
- Migration tools for importing and exporting in VM from other Vendors
- Ability to create VM and then deploy in AWS and Microsoft cloud and vice versa
June 19, 2017
Scale Computing HC3 is a no brainer
It is being used across the whole organization and we have migrated most of our servers to run virtually within HC3. We should be finalizing all the movements this year.
- Ease of use
- Great support
- Uptime is great
June 19, 2017
Ease of Use!
My IT department uses Scale Computing HC3 to host VMs for critical business and service functioning within the organization. We also replicate the VMs to a second remote Scale for DR purposes.
- Scale is easy to use. Basic functionality and management of Scale is easy to learn and put into practice.
- The primary con is Scale is not recognized as a 'big player' in the market. As a result, some applications will not assure support for their product running on a VM on something other that VMware or Hyper-V or XenServer. My disappointment lies primarily with these companies who don't recognize Scale.
June 19, 2017
Scale vs. VMware (Scale Wins)
We use Scale Computing HC3 to host our VOIP product, this replaced a VMWare setup.
- Simple interface: The user interface is graphical and easy to navigate. Creating a new VM is quick.
- Scalable: Easy to add additional nodes to increase capacity, no loss of data and minimal down time.
- Support: Scale technical support is helpful and responsive. We have had a few drives fail and replacement shipping is usually overnight!
- Details performance reports: We would like to see detailed performance reports for a specific VM, server and cluster.
- Better error logs: We have had errors on the GUI that say something like "The system has an error, contact support". This is unsettling as a large portion of our business relays on these servers.
- Better built in graphics support on VMs. We would like to use a few VM's as remote connection workstations, however the virtual graphics cards make this impossible, we can only get 800x400 display and that carries through to remote connection programs.
June 12, 2017
My life with Scale Computing.
We are using the HC3 cluster as our main virtual environment for our servers. We also use it to connect to an offsite location for our server backups.
- You can quickly install OS images to put into production or to test.
- Technical support has been wonderful in answering my questions.
- Keeping up to date with firmware updates.
- An easier way to delete older notifications (conditions).
- Better scaled console interface in the web browsers.
June 12, 2017
Scale Rocks
We virtualize several servers used by the entire school. Also, we have a replication node in another location for disaster recovery.
- Their customer service is top notch. When we have issues (rarely) they get back to us immediately, always resolve the issue in a timely manner, and explain everything that happened.
- The GUI interface is way beyond any other virtual appliance I've ever used. It's super easy to configure. I can ramp up new servers in minutes.
- I have no complaints whatsoever about their products.
June 12, 2017
Scale HC3 - The value in hyper-converged computing
We are using Scale across our entire corporation which includes retail, wholesale and manufacturing entities. We run a mixture of Debian Linux and Windows Server 2012r2 with 27 VMs total. We have appreciated the performance improvements and flexibility of a single large storage pool after migrating from a solution where we had several standalone servers hosting VMs.
- HC3 makes it dead easy to clone a VM from a snapshot and get it up and running using their simple web interface.
- The HC3 dashboard allows one to see at a glance the major indicators of server utilization across the cluster.
- Spinning up a new VM based on a template makes the job of adding a new server easy and quick.
- HC3 does not offer guaranteed support for Debian Linux, however we have not run into any significant issues despite using it heavily in production.
June 12, 2017
Tired of VMWare - Scale up to a better solution!
Scale is providing 98% of our virtual infrastructure for the entire CU.
- Ease of Deployment
- Baked in replication
- US Based Support that cares about their clients
- Increased support from software manufacturers
HC3 is running almost the entirety of our server workload. The IT department (2 employees) are really the only direct users.
- Spooling up a new virtual machine is crazy easy. Our setup for our 4-server infrastructure was done (OS install and configuration included) inside of 2 hours! Granularity, speed, and ease of use make for a very potent combination.
- Monitoring and managing from the HC3 console is excellent. The intuitive interface has just the right amount of detail. Changes - from changing a backup/replication schedule to adding a new drive to a VM - are done in a snap.
- Rolling updates are awesome.
- The snapshot scheduling interface could use a bit of work to become as intuitive as the rest of HC3. The granularity is beautiful, as is the ability to make live changes, but it took a bit of time to understand how to create a nightly *and* hourly schedule for the same machine.
June 08, 2017
My Scale Computing HC3 Review
Our Scale HC3 system has allowed us to consolidate and visualize our current outdated servers. This solution should keep our environment running more efficiently for years to come.
- We are able to utilize all available within the servers
- We are able to control every aspect of our VMs from one central control panel.
- We are able to spin up a new or duplicate VM in seconds.
- Integrating a front end security control panel or integrate with 3rd party.
- The ability to export syslog files.
June 07, 2017
Hardware that is reliable
It is our primary Virtual Server Center. It is utilized by the entire company. It has resolved issues we where having with our old system in the area of network connectivity bottle-neck and VM Storage management.
- Technical Support is probably there biggest strength. There hasn't been a single time as of yet that I haven't been able to get a hold of someone quickly. All of the support personnel at every level are very knowledgeable about the product.
- Management is always ready to hear any concerns you have.
- I have to mention Technical support again, because it deserve that much space :) .
- Their Hyper-visor is always being improved, and that is the only real area I can think of that needs improvement. But they are constantly adding newer and expanded features to rival the top tier VM software vendors. So not really an area they need to improve, but an area where I am just impatient to see what they come out with next.
June 07, 2017
Tipping the Scale in hyper-convergence for SMB
We migrated from a pure physical environment to Scale Computing HC3 to host all of our business critical servers and data for our entire organization. The process was pretty easy and it has improved up time, eased maintenance of the servers, and due to granular snapshots, reduced the stress about patching servers.
- I love the fact that with Scale Computing there truly is a single pane of glass to manage everything. It is very easy to use as anything you need to do is typically just a couple of clicks with the mouse. If you want to spin up a copy of a server for testing off of a snapshot, 4 clicks, and all without leaving the screen that you are on and you are done. Need to move a vm to a different host, click and drag it to the new host with no interruption to the end users, or noticeable impact on performance.
- Scale Computing HC3 has the best support that I have ever seen. On the rare times I have required them, I have always received a real, easy to understand, person after a couple of rings. They have been quick to respond and after allowing them remote access to the system, have been able to quickly resolve any issue that I have had.
- One area of improvement would be is to have the ability to resize a hard drive inside a VM.
June 07, 2017
Scale Computing HC3 Review
ssss
- Setup was easy with Scale's assistance. Rack, connect, and they walk you through establishing the cluster. Then, it just runs! Upload your OS ISO's and you're off and running.
- VM creation is a extremely quick and easy. Modification of CPU/RAM/Disk of existing VM's is also easy.
- High availability. If one node goes down all the VM's on that node automatically migrate to other nodes. (I haven't had any issues with the boxes, so this hasn't occurred. But, firmware upgrades do take individual cluster nodes offline during the upgrade process, so that simulates it.)
- Performance. We're running 25 VM's on our 4-node Scale HC3 cluster. We have the middle tier platform, HC2000 with SAS drives and 10 Gb NICs, and the performance has been excellent.
- Reduction of physical servers, power, and heat. We used to have 2 full racks of physical servers, plus several remote servers. All using power and generating heat. Now, we could fit everything in a half rack.
- Support. Scale's support team is outstanding. Every time I call or open a ticket on their support portal, I get a response immediately. And it's by a team of well-trained professionals, speaking English, based in Indiana!
- Ability to grow. Just add a node to the cluster. Boom! Extra CPU/RAM/Disk available immediately. And you can add nodes while the cluster is running.
- Disaster Recovery. We added 2 DR nodes at a remote site and are replicating snapshots of all our servers nightly. This was a huge win for us, as we've been struggling with BCP/DR for years.
- Cannot modify CPU/RAM/Disk while a VM is running. Not a huge Con in my book, since I don't have a lot of need for this.
- Took them a while add support for Windows Server 2016(and Windows 10).
June 07, 2017
Scale - Vision - Implementation - Stable - GREAT!
Scale Computing is used within our organization as a whole, running all sorts of servers and platforms. It addresses having quick backups (snapshots) to recover from in case of a disaster or a configuration changed that has been botched. It also has stability and quickness within the hardware that makes using it seamless as well as when migrations occur, there is no down time nor slowdown.
- Scale Support is second to none. Fast. Timely. Precise. No running around the bush when it comes to calling them for assistance or technical issues.
- Scale Support has made setup a breeze on new units, as well as adding a unit. Up and running in minutes and ready to use shortly after.
- Scale is constantly updating and bettering there firmware, adding features, making improvements, and creating one of the best virtual platforms out there today.
- On the Summary portion of the VM in questions, I would like to see the % of Memory used (performance).
- Instead of fixing the problem and saying it's fixed, problem/solution explanation on each ticket/issue and if something can be avoided and addressed to prevent it from happening again.
- I would love to see a mobile app of some sort or the GUI mobile friendly in the future.