Scale Computing Platform

I believe that for any scenario where you need a virtualization platform with decent performance, high availability, and a responsive technical support team, Scale Computing Platform servers would be a good fit. To be honest, I'm not sure which scenarios would be less appropriate.

I would recommend it to anyone who has three or more servers. We just received another quote as I am about to deploy Scale at City Hall as well. This will replace my 8-year-old VMware cluster that hosts 20 servers.

I can heartily recommend Scale Computing Platform for anyone looking into virtualization. If you've been in IT very long you'll appreciate the benefits and the pain points Scale Computing Platform can address with its elegant design. But the reason I have chosen the maximum 10 for my rating is my experience with the Scale Computing Platform support team. I'll describe two incidents in some detail: 1) A long term power outage caused a need to shut down VMs on the backend, under time pressure. We reached support via cellphone and they stayed with us throughout the process. We accessed the backend directly on the nodes while support recited the required command line statements. In the end we were able to shut down all the VMs, and then the nodes, gracefully. Bravo Scale! 2) We had an unsupported VM requirement (an old Red Hat Linux v5 server) which was a very tough nut to crack. Scale Computing Platform support rendered a herculean, and successful, effort to get this ancient hardware and software virtualized. I can honestly say that, without their assistance I would never have gotten this server virtualized.

Well suited: Companies with smaller IT teams and standard Windows/Linux VMs. If you need a solution out of the box that is just working with almost no admin overhead. If you like the idea that you can extend your hypervisor cluster with a new server, 2 cables and 4 commands. If you want to enhance your backup strategy with hourly/daily/weekly real-time snapshots that produce almost no disk or IO cost. If you don't want to care about hardware, drivers, firmware, updates etc. If you want one of the best customer support in industry. Not well suited: Companies with big IT teams with many roles or more exotic needs. If you need granular user rights. When you have very dynamic RAM or CPU needs, that benefit from Hot Add or dynamic memory allocation. When you need to virtualize more exotic OSes. When you have big hypervisor farms where hosts need to go offline for power savings, etc.

Scale seems like a good fit for us with 15 virtual machines. I can't really say about a larger environment, but the nice thing about HCI is that if you need more CPU, RAM, or storage you just need to add a node. That is really nice as far as I'm concerned.

Onboarding with Scale was such a breeze. I worried about how difficult it would be to migrate my servers from Hyper-V over to Scale, it was the easiest migration I've ever had.

The Scale Platform is perfectly suited to run multiple Windows and Linux servers and run them at peak performance. The Scale Platform is also really excellent at data recovery with the intuitive way to mount a snapshot's drive and retrieve any potentially missing data.

The single scenario where we have found Scale to not be great at was when we needed to migrate some existing Cisco-based servers and were unable to do so since they were not supported on a Scale platform.

Anywhere that requires highly available, highly scalable setups. As optics on the client are required prior to quoting, it's difficult to undersell, which is a huge bonus.

I believe that they function well in what they do.

It is well suited for use in an environment where downtime isn't an option; production can't stop. Even for our small shop, if something goes wrong or an HDD on a standalone server fails, we need to be up and running within an hour and Scale allows this, within minutes typically having multiple nodes at our disposal to migrate a server to.

Well suited for small to medium environments, where they may have a limited IT staff. The core data center administrators are challenged to maintain 24/7 uptime and to protect the critical data that resides in the databases and file services that make up the data center that may be spread across dozens or hundreds of workloads. The infrastructure to run all of these workloads and store their data can become complex as it grows and administrators may be challenged to manage multiple server, storage, and virtualization technologies to form the infrastructure. There are a vast number of benefits of moving to a solution combining the best of both worlds.

Scale definitely has a market where it fits and is a great solution (small to medium-sized businesses). Very large organizations may be better suited to a different solution. For the market that Scale fits into, it really is a perfect solution. I had compared Scale to Nutanix and while Nutanix had some additional features, I couldn't justify the additional costs. However, a large organization may find that additional feature set very useful and worth the additional costs.

Scale Computing HC3 is great for small to medium businesses and I.T. departments. They have a great pane of glass to tell what is going on in the environment. They also scale out very easily. I would also have to say they have some of the best support around.

The only thing I could think that would not be the best scenario for Scale Computing HC3 is in extremely large companies.

The unit I have is very for small SMBs with few or no full time IT personnel, they can be remotely managed and with the new single node option you can have off-site backup/disaster recovery set up in a very time. I can see how this system can be used with multiple small offices/remote site and can scale up to larger enterprises.

I have used the Scale Computing HC3 system to save time by purchasing an appropriate server operating system license and delivering a fully functional server with less time and expense of a physical server. With any purchasing decision you have to weigh out costs and benefits and this system was a perfect fit for our business. They continue to grow and improve their products, so we will be able to continue using their system into the future.

With a combination of great pricing, ease of use, top-notch support, and scalability, Scale Computing really hits the mark for the small and medium business market. They really make things a lot easier for companies with minimal IT staff.

Less appropriate if you like to get dirty with the details of maintaining the system. Everything else is great. It does exactly what it is supposed to do and is as hands-off as it can be without being a managed service. You do not have to worry about it doing its job. This is my biggest plus. I don't have to worry about it.

This a great solution for smaller organizations to utilize a virtual environment that takes advantage of hyper converged environment. It has all of our CPU processing, SAN storage, and processing memory in one package that is very easy to monitor utilization and at a very low cost.

Scale Computing HC3 is well suited for companies that need a lot of storage and performance, but don't have a large budget, or even for ones that do.

Scale is obviously well-suited for SMB / SME environments. Larger environments will likely find a reduced need for dedicated storage admins or VM specialists in-house. Environments that rely on SDN or very complex VLANs may find Scale's networking to be somewhat limited.

Cross site VDI or other windows/Linux server deployments

Getting rid of our old environment and not having to pay for extended warranties and all the additional licensing that come with a virtual environment. I have to say our experience has been amazing so far. The support has been responsive and immediate with the handful of calls we have made due to questions and not issues. Updates are easy and seamless and downtime has been nonexistent. We were looking for a solution that would just work for us as we have limited resources in our IT department to dedicate to manage these systems. I will say Scale was the right choice for us, and the price was attractive as well!

Scale is well suited for small - medium sized businesses who are looking to virtualize their server environment. However, the great thing about Scale is how scalable it is. Scale can really be used for any sized business.

I think in small business scenarios where the amount of servers is small and not quite as much granular access to the VM's and datastore is required, this solution meets the business needs quite well and is a great bang for the buck.

In large enterprise scenarios where there are higher volumes of VM's and greater details regarding VM's, resources and datastores are needed this solution is probably not the best fit.

For small and medium businesses it's hard to beat. It's very simple to install, move you're VMs to, and manage. You have computing, storage, and backups/replication all in 1 blade/cluster. I can see it being a bit of a challenge in larger corporations due to the lack of some advanced features provided by VMware and others.