Scale Computing Platform

Scale is great for mid-size organizations with 50-200 employees. Anywhere under that, there are likely solutions that are more cost-effective, over that I'm not sure but you can expand as needed. IT admins who want to focus less on server hardware will appreciate the all in one package and manageability of scale.

Small to mid-sized companies that want something easy. We have approximately 20 servers in production on the cluster and sleep well at night knowing it works. Have not tested but it may not be suited for high volume transactions. Not sure.

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.

Based on my experience, I think smaller SMB shops that want to simplify their infrastructure and primarily have a mix of light-weight systems (Domain Controllers, Web Servers, some SQL but not a ton, File Servers, etc.) are the "perfect fit" for SCALE.

I think if they straighten out a few of the kinks in their process and product, they will actually be a perfect fit for us. That all said, this probably sounds overly negative so I will state that I am very glad that we went with SCALE HC3 and in retrospect, I wouldn't change that decision. I think they are one of the best hyper-converged platforms on the market.

If you are looking at an IT refresh and you realize you also are using a mix of a bunch of different products and platforms to achieve high-availability, to provide backup and recovery, etc, etc, SCALE could very well be an excellent fit for you because you can collapse all of that "stuff" into one platform that by-and-large does it all very well.

We have multiple hardware that may need a new computer with its own specific settings, Scale makes this very easy to implement within hours instead of waiting days and weeks for systems and set up.

Well Suited: 1. Small to medium environments. We have maxed out our ability to add more nodes at 6. (Not sure if that's because of the level of boxes I chose or a limitation of the system. However, I believe that this size works well for us. 2. Anywhere there is a need for high availability. Since we have switched to Scales HC3 environment, about a year ago, we have not had a single server down!

Ill Suited: 1. Large environments.

Having multiple clusters in the same location that are replicating to one another would be a good fit for a high availability environment. I do not believe it would be suited for a small business environment.

I would recommend to any colleague. I honestly think it is priced at the low end that most mid-sized businesses could afford and I wouldn't doubt the ability for a Scale system to handle a very large implementation as well.

HC3's greatest strength would have to be its tremendous flexibility in scenarios where an erratic or uncertain growth rate needs to be accommodated. While performance can be matched by other vendors or system designs, HC3 shines when it comes to its ease of system administration (creation/sizing/moving of VMs and their storage resources within the system).

It’s great for small to mid size companies, not so much large companies. Scale meeting our budget was crucial for our decision making.

The only place we have not been able to use a Scale HC3 is when dealing with a software vendor which will not support VMs on any other software/hardware not related to Hyper-V or VMWare. We have been successful using these devices to replace all types of servers.

A great scenario where Scale computing is almost perfect would be in class room type environment. I am a technical lead for the East Carolina University Collegiate Cyber defense competition, we need to have a lab environment with many different operating systems that can all communicate with each other so that we can practice cyber security techniques. With my experience in using the HC3 I feel that it would be a wonderful environment to practice cyber defense.

This is a quick way to deploy a resilient virtual environment that has decent specifications and flexibility, but not as good as some other solutions if you need to closely monitor individual VMs or require regular snapshot management.

All the virtualization without Nesting (a VM in a VM) is great with Scale. We don't have many tools either to control the server so we are always with a small 5% that we can't be autonomous.

Scale hits the sweet spot for the SMB market. The product and support are what a small company needs to get into the efficiencies the big boys enjoy and does it without the costs they pay. They do a great job of lifting SMBs into the true disaster recovery. I think it would be overkill where files sharing is a major activity. We are keeping only user folders on our hosted VMs. We use Synology appliances for shared storage and for hosting data on our DMZ accessed by external clients.

These setups are ideal for SMBs with limited staff knowledge.

Scale is great for an environment that needs shared storage and organization and lacks resources to invest in a SAN environment.

In a business where they need a large amount of VMs that need to be highly available.

It's well suited for shops that are looking to move from other virtual environments and or had no virtual setup at all. There is some vendor lock-in, but for us, that is not a big deal. We had no existing virtual setup to integrate with. This setup we felt was much more cost effective for what we were trying to accomplish. I'm sure there are the less appropriate scenarios out there, that's up to the IT shops that are doing the evaluations.

Good for mission-critical systems. VDI desktops.

Not good for REALLY small business where 1 server is all the resource needed.

Great in consolidating older legacy server hardware and server OS into one system

Well suited for smaller clients who would like to save money on storage and virtualization costs. Provides disaster recovery, virtualization, and back-end storage at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. It is easy to set up and manage. Customer support is top notch and always available. Less appropriate for enterprise or larger customers needing more functionality.

We would recommend a customer look at Scale HC3 if they want a simple/fast way to deploy a clustered environment. The price point on a Scale Computing HC3 cluster isn't very appealing compared to a HyperV cluster build with a SAN, but we understand the power behind the all-in-one approach of Scale HC3.