Scale Computing Platform

We primarily use the cluster to run the domain controllers, ERP software, Exchange hybrid server, etc. Availability has been great, with very few issues. Overall, it's been a great experience and we know we can count on the Scale cluster to keep everything up and running.

DCs, File Shares, Web Servers, Exchange 2016, SQL, the list goes on.

Solid Works Vault. Efolder.

We have a very large File Server that we heavily rely on. Recently, we've been growing at a rapid rate, and being able to expand the resources on the server on the fly has saved our bacon many of times. Whether it's expanding the CPU, RAM, or most often in our situation, the hard drive space; It's great to know we can always scale our server as needed in a quick fashion.

Our whole business depends on the HC3 cluster working. Currently, the most critical apps that we run, are a suite of home built modules for interfacing with our ERP system. Just the other day, we started running out of resources with our VM, and in a matter of about 2 minutes, I was able to go in and allocate more resources to eliminate any problems.

First off, I'd like to object to the statement that "Hyper-converged Infrastructure products like Scale Computing HC3 are designed to make it easy to run applications in a highly scalable manner" in the prompting question. They're not. They're designed to make running workloads easier. Name me one HCI provider out there that makes it easy to scale workloads. Just one. You won't be able to because that's not the job of HCI. That's the job of the management and orchestration layer that turns virtualization - whether HCI or not - into something most of us would call a "cloud".

I think this is an important piece of context for discussion. HCI in general - and Scale's offering very specifically - is based emphatically on ease of use. If what you're looking for are edge cases like high frequency trading or other extreme use case niches, look elsewhere. That's not what HCI is about.

Those workloads are the equivalent of commuting to work on a Saturn V. Think of Scale Computing more like the Honda Civic of IT. It is powerful enough to deal with the overwhelming majority of use cases. It will meet the needs of the mass market. It will run all your day-to-day mundane infrastructure workloads from the SMB to the enterprise and fit very nicely in ROBO scenarios.

What you're not going to get from a Scale HCI cluster - at least not until an all-flash NVMe version running on top of 25GbE or 100GbE networking comes out - is something that will handle huge databases with ultra low latency requirements and trillions of transactions per second. Nor is Scale going to be the super cheap near-zero-margin $/TB bulk storage solution required for large-scale data warehousing. If you're building a massive radio telescope, maybe look elsewhere.

But for the rest of us, for those running a few thousand people in an exchange environment, or a modest use case database for a point of sales application, for some VDI or image rendering or a hundred other workloads I've run on Scale, it just works. That's what hyperconvergence is: It Just Works(TM) in a turnkey appliance for 90% of workloads you could ever want.

The most critical thing we run here is an actual refinery. We are 24/7/365 staffed and data logging, HMI, and analytics servers MUST be online and safe running. That is what scale provides for us. A low-overhead, secure, robust system that just works.

We are currently running 2 SQL instances and the results have been great. We have support systems running as well, but the value has been in the database systems running.

My main experience running Scale is in a medical office with a dozen docs and dozens of medical assistants, nurses and staff. Scale runs the legacy practice management platform that is needed every day to look up patient history, but was running on outdated and vulnerable bare-metal. Virtualizing this application and surrounding it with best practice network services running on brand new Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machines made it easy to optimize the network and end a bad uptime regime.

Exchange Server 2010 - HC3 has been integral to running our own Exchange server on-premises than in the cloud and this is more cost effective for us. The service is replicated daily to a DR cluster and provides 24x7 email access to our users. Our ERP application running on SQL is served on the HC3 cluster providing reliable performance and data integrity is maintained.

We run our accounting system, our content management system, customer portals, SQL servers, OCR servers, AV and AD on Scale's infrastructure.

Right now we run everything from active directory, file and printer servers, HR software, and 4 to 5 different databases without issue.

AD, TermServer, Database applications, File server functionality.
Disaster Recovery as we replicate VMs between two Scale devices.

We have only run our hosted VoIP product on Scale. It runs well, we have had an issue with cron jobs across the VMs that spike system resources that was difficult to diagnose using the reporting tools provided by Scale.

I'm runnig a Domain Controller and a file server. Nothing major.

Our main database runs on Scale. When we need to do updates, they are worry free since we can do a quick snapshot and/or clone so that we could recover quickly if need be. We also run several web servers and some other services that we are testing for eventual deployment - it's super easy to ramp up a new server to test anything and then blow it away once we're done.

One of the business-critical applications we run our our Scale Cluster is Epicor ERP. When transferring our Epicor server from a physical box to a Scale VM we saw marked improvement despite allocating a lot less RAM. This was due to the improved IO of the cluster.

We run voice and data applications that support our environment, and the built-in replication to another cluster affords us the peace of mind to fail-over and it just works. No third party products to worry about, no crazy changes, just fail-over and you are up and running in minutes. We demand high availability for specific applications that affect tens of thousands of members.

Our file server resides on one of the VMs managed by HC3. Soon after firing up the primary file server, we implemented its twin (with real-time replication) as a second file server VM at our disaster recovery site. No issues. Seriously, none.
On the next VM over, we find our company's primary DNS server. Very important. No issues. No interruptions, lack of compute power, nothing.
I would gladly recommend using Scale for business-critical functions.

Redundancy ....... Reduncancy ......... Redundancy........ This provides a easy simple way to accomplish this objective.

We don't have a lot of applications running from the VMs themselves. Really the only one that works completely off of the server is our financial and project tracking software from Deltek. The majority of my needs lie in scalable storage. Currently HC3 software doesn't have a way to scale storage on the fly like the other major VM sofware manufacturers, but I know it is a feature that they are working on.

We run all of our applications such as our financial, exchange, payroll, scheduling, and hr software, as well as our file server and domain controllers without any issues.

We run the following on our Scale HC3 cluster:
- Active Directory - 4 servers in total. Zero problems.
- SQL/Reporting - No issues and it's fast.
- Dynamics on SQL - again, no issues and its fast.
- SQL database servers for custom order processing applications. Works great.
- WSUS for Windows Updates.
- Print/Scan-to-email server.
- Groups server.
- Software/Build server.
- Certificate Authority servers.

All of these apps/servers run as expected, even when one or more of the SQL servers are doing heavy things. IOPS and CPU are never a problem.

SQL - running it within the 'These go to 11' setting within the system makes it run smooth, seamless, with no interruptions whatsoever.

We run our Exchange Sever with 85 mailboxes that are 4-8GB each. We are a sales driven company so we see a lot of Exchange traffic and have never had slowness related to the hyper-converged model. We also run our entire ERP system from Scale Computing and that system is used by 90% of our employees 8-9 hours a day with no slowness issues.