Scale Computing Platform

Ease of use and TOC.
We needed to go with something simple as our environment is not complex.
The members of the IT team are lower level from a technical standpoint and can easily administer the system.
The GUI is web based so allows us to access the system remotely.
One step upgrades available with no downtime.

More flexible and willingness to meet customer requirements vs other companies.

Scale has basically the same features that Nutanix offers but was more geared towards small to medium size business. Scale was the only vender that offered an evaluation tool to see exactly how much power we needed in each node to begin our transition. Based on that they gave me a custom quote that blew away the price that Nutanix was offering. The cost on 1 of the 3 nodes from Nutanix was almost the same as the cost for the total Scale system.

As a long-time HPE shop, we did look at Simplivity (even knowing that HPE's lackadaisical support was likely to poison Simplivity post-acquisition), but we were very underwhelmed by the demonstrator's lack of expertise in the product, and some basic limitations surrounding the offering.
Nutanix was incredibly expensive when comparing apples-to-apples, and did not provide any meaningful advantages over other options.
As a corporate VMWare shop, we also looked at this option, but to achieve our goals, we would need several 3rd party products and full-time administrator training and expertise to adequately manage the environment, making the total cost of ownership prohibitively expensive.

I believe there are many pros and cons to each of the stated products but I feel when looking at Scale compared to those products Scale was an easy choice based on its performance, its user-friendly dashboard, their customer service and lastly the price. I felt as if you couldn't go wrong with Scale.

I have evaluated some products from Dell and Nutanix but I decided to purchase Scale because of the positive reviews I read on Spiceworks.

The vendors that I mentioned offer solutions very close to Scale Computing however, we found out that their solutions had many pieces and a lot of overhead. The overall ability to consolidate different pieces such as Backup-replication, Storage, Virtualization Software, Availability, licencing and support beats any other solution out there. I highly recommend this solution to anyone looking for simplicity, reliability and effortless migration and implementation.

If I felt they were better I would have purchased them instead.

We have built out several test environments and have demoed all of these products and we were not able to build out or purchase an environment that performed as well or had the features as Scale HC3 for the same investment.

Scale Computing had zero pressure tactic and delivered on every word they said and more. The pricing was on par with the competitors, but I was getting the high end of Scale's solution while with the others I was getting their low end. Without a doubt we made the perfect choice going with Scale Computing.

When we implemented our first HC3 cluster almost 5 years ago, we also reviewed options from Dell, HP, and Nutanix and found they just didn't stack up to what we saw in Scale Computing HC3, particularly with their price point. Being a school, IT budgets are always very tight so it was great to find a solution that met all our needs and budget requirements.

We considered Simplivity and Nutanix. HC3 compared well against both, seemed more flexible from a hardware standpoint, and allowed for easier incremental refresh and expansion. HC3 also eliminated the need and cost for VMware.

Scale was less expensive and delivered all of our needs.

The fact that everything is integrated is fantastic. "One throat to choke" should something go wrong. I do not have to worry about if this software update is going to interfere with this hardware version....or vice versa. They check and recheck before they start pushing updates out. Sometimes that is sort of frustrating because I know there is some sort of update I want in the pipeline; but if I really want, they can get me upgraded before the public release. All of this and it is not even an alpha/beta release.....more of a post-beta if you will. I have done this twice and have never seen a single issue because of it.

We were looking for a hyper-converged solution that was cost effective, yet would deliver the performance we needed for our day-to-day operations. Scale HC3 meets our needs in both areas.

We selected Scale because they gave us a great price for the performance we needed. At the time of purchase, all the other vendors didn't have a lower end model and the price start point was much higher.

Scale Computing HC3 was way better than the competition in price and features and ease of use. What they give up on certain more advanced features they make up in ease of use and reliability and I wasn't going to use those advanced features anyways. They also are light years ahead in support and truly knowing their customers and going the extra mile for them.

When researching hyperconverged technology, we looked at several leading providers. In each case, the cost of the system far outweighed Scale Computing's, without providing any additional benefits that we could discern. In some cases, the same price at Scale would only purchase 2 nodes at another vendor, reducing our fail over redundancy. In other cases, only the hyperconvergence software was provided. When comparing prices to purchase the individual machines plus the software, Scale came out ahead again by a large margin.

Nutanix, Cisco. Scale computing sales and after sales support is no where close to any other vendors.

HP Servers with a NetApp SAN - non hyperconverged solution

Nutanix Hyper Converged Soltions

Scale is less expensive and similar in nature. However, Scale has a ways to go to catch up to them.

I don't have any real-world experience with Nutanix but we did demo their product and I did a fair bit of research. I also looked heavily at other products in the hyper-converged space.

My "end of the day" analysis is that SCALE HC3 is one of the few "full stack" platforms. What I mean by that is that most other products are just some re-mix of existing storage technologies (SAN) that have been virtualized and put into the hyper-visor stack. As a result, the management of the system is fragmented. HC3 on the other hand was built "from the ground up" to be a Hyper-Converged product and as a result, everything is managed under one roof. You don't have to "worry" about 10 different components all being configured correctly to work together, SCALE is a single, unified product and that makes them different than 90% of the other players out there which are pretty much borrowing VMware and then tacking on some kind of VSAN to make a Hyper-Converged stack. This might sound intangible but it results in real-world differences in how the product works and is managed on a day-to-day basis.