Scale Computing Platform

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.

Hardware and infrastructure very basic administration for an IT guys', all the time they're busy for schedule maintenance. Scale Computing Platform give us a platform where we effectively manage our hardware needs, cloud infrastructure and best part is a fully integrated platform that runs our business apps, visualization computing platform that's easy to deploy and easy to manage.

If you're using some of the latest Windows OS's, you'll be fine. If you're looking to upgrade those while in the process of migrating - consider building a new image and migrating the data/services manually. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to upgrade an VM's OS. Scale Computing Platform does well with almost all Operating Systems. We haven't run into any hardware or software incompatibilities moving from Vmware. We wanted to do VDI for a lot less money but the jury is out on whether Scale Computing Platform + GPU cards are going to be enough for things like Adobe Creative cloud in a lab of 30 terminals.

Scale is a perfect solution for schools looking to switch over from a clunkier system such as VMware. They simplify how virtual computing is handled and, over the year, has been nothing but stable. We are able to roll out the newest updates and patches over three nodes with zero downtime and offer a backup node that is easy to set up and use, and make restoring VMs on the fly a walk in the park.

While migrating from our Hyper-V solutions, we ran into some errors while using the Carbonite Migrate software on the target machine, and it kept BSOD each time it was power cycled or rebooted, and support sat on the phone for hours on end with me until the issue was resolved and this was at 11:00 pm EST on the weekend.

I feel Scale Computing is well suited for any small or medium business that needs more than 1 physical server. The ease of use and capabilities of the cluster are really unmatched for the price. I like how all the features are included for one price. I could even see it being used in a larger enterprise environment.

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.

In our mid size school it is a good fit. It was a little more expensive than I originally wanted, but it makes up for it with features and ease of use. I think it would scale up nicely to meet a larger storage, and compute need than ours. On the downside I think we are about as small as we could go with the product. If you are a smaller entity than what we are you will struggle finding a solution with Scale to fit your need.

In our situation, Scale Computing has been an excellent fit for our network. Being a medium-sized company with a small IT department, we have been able to leverage the ease of use to greatly speed up our ability to react to new ideas, and knowing that our virtual machines are running on a solid platform makes everyone feel better about our hardware on the backend. We are much less concerned with single points of failure in the server room.

Scale is a great solution for budget-minded institutions that also have a smaller than average I.T. staff. It has been reliable for us.

For those business that need more reporting, this is not the solution for you.

I think in a smaller environment, Scale provides a great way to get into a virtualized environment. The setup is very simple and it doesn't require significant knowledge of IT infrastructure in order to get up and running. Scale doesn't offer the advanced insight into storage and application resource groups as their competitors do, however it is not designed for advanced users. It is more of a closed box and support handles most requests or issues quickly, but there is not a way for administrators to easily see advanced details of the cluster.

Scale is the best solution for small to medium size businesses that want to protect their data and increase their uptime. The only real flaw I see is with the limitation to only have a VM backup to one remote location. With larger businesses, it would be critical to have more than one location to protect your data. Even in our situation, our two locations a fairly close to each other so a natural disaster could possibly take out both locations.

Just like any HCI application, if your storage, compute, and memory needs can be quantified and accurately forecasted, comparing HCI to a traditional infrastructure stack is simple and generally easy to architect. In our case, the HCI solution cost even less than a comparable multi-vendor infrastructure solution, but with added benefits: Single vendor/tested solution, no additional software or management tools needed, and it's the easiest to manage/maintain/secure.

I believe Scale is a solution for small to mid organizations who need VM solutions above the free realm but not the large scale solutions that are not feasible nor utilized to their full potential. Scale is perfect specifically for education as it addresses all of our needs in tools, disaster recovery, reliability, and cost.

After thoroughly reviewing most of the hyper-converged systems in the market I knew that Scale was going to be the perfect fit for us, and they have been. It's run all of our systems without any issues at all.

If you are going to virtualize your server infrastructure Scale is an excellent choice. If you only have one server I don't see the need.

If cost is not prohibitive, many small business would benefit from the redundancy and cost savings through the simplicity of managing this system. Scale Computing has addressed this issue by creating a 1U standalone system thus taking advantage of their storage and hypervisor technology, but the downside is less redundancy. I understand that with the new flash drive units, the IOPS performance is stellar, which would make it suitable for much larger business than what was previously available. I think this solution is way better than anything out there if only people knew.

Scale is well suited for the 1-10 employee small business to the 1000+ and beyond. The SMB that could benefit from a virtual environment but may think they are too small for it to be feasible, is very well suited for a Scale stack. Large enterprise businesses are well suited as the Scale stacks can grow with a company. The powerful yet simplistic management of the system means fewer man-hours are required to operate and they are freed up for other projects. Scale would be less appropriate in an organization with other virtual certification holders unwilling to discover the powerful system and ease of use until the price and performance are made known to management.

HC3 is extremely easy to setup, install and maintain straight out the box. Very quick to spin up a VM and you're able to set up snapshots and replication to additional clusters. We have three clusters on site, one of which is assigned for disaster recovery. We have tested this and were able to have systems back online at the DR site within 15 minutes.

For a K-12 environment of very few employees, this solution is perfect for ease-of-use, and low-overhead management. Also, the solution has been solid performer over the past 2 years.

Scale Computing is well suited for anyone who is looking to create a virtualized server environment that values price, performance, and reliability. The footprint of the hardware makes it so that it can be placed in even the smallest of racks and give you the performance and scalability of the larger companies at a fraction of the price.

I cannot really foresee where Scale Computing HC3 is less appropriate. They have different packages for clusters that works for small to large size businesses. We resell our software to other vendors to supply to their clients and we will only support the Scale Computing HC3 cluster to install our application due to its capabilities, easy to use and amazing support from their help desk. We started off as a small to medium size business when I was introduced to Scale. From there we have been slowly increasing in our business size. Scale follows along beside us and is able to assist in our expansion at a moment's notice.

Great for environment with simple needs and light-touch IT staff. It really is very simple and does what it does quite well.

HC3 is well suited for small business clients needing advanced virtual infrastructure pieces but not looking to incur a large CAPEX. It may be less appropriate at the enterprise level.

It is great for the normal IT Server functions and light database. At this time based on our deployment, I would not recommend this for high database loads. Having said that I would not deploy an ERP database on an Intel based system.

We're planning to migrate in the third quarter MS Exchange on the Scale cluster as well, our analysis indicates that we should have enough resources within the cluster to accommodate this.