Damn good option - I am sold for sure.
Updated February 20, 2019
Damn good option - I am sold for sure.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
We use our Scale cluster across all departments. The ease of use really does seem almost too good to be true....but this is one of those rare times that it really is just that easy and that good. While I completely appreciate that the initial investment can cause a bit of sticker shock, the amount of time and money saved in the long run far outweighs the initial costs. Our C-Level people are still impressed that I can have a new fully updated server ready to go in under an hour.....and honestly it is closer to 20 minutes if everyone would leave me alone for a bit.
We have been able to move about 85% of our servers to this solution - with the remainder only being on physical because they are fairly new or awful close to EoL and timing has been an issue.
I still think my favorite thing is being able to reboot a server and only waiting about 2-3 minutes for it to be fully loaded again instead of the normal 15-20 minutes a physical machine takes. My service windows have been able to be escalated since the downtime is so low now.
We have been able to move about 85% of our servers to this solution - with the remainder only being on physical because they are fairly new or awful close to EoL and timing has been an issue.
I still think my favorite thing is being able to reboot a server and only waiting about 2-3 minutes for it to be fully loaded again instead of the normal 15-20 minutes a physical machine takes. My service windows have been able to be escalated since the downtime is so low now.
- Quick restarts. In our tests with other solutions, a restart could still take 8-12 minutes, which was pretty much on par with physical.
- Great VM snapshot schedules. I can set it to backup just about any time of day I want....with multiple schedules available (that I get to create).
- Easy to use management console. It took me a couple of hours to get very comfortable with the interface. Now I can walk people through it over the phone for the times I am not in the office.
- Sticker Shock. Not the biggest con since you can do so much for that price, but it was probably the biggest hurdle I had in going this way....but it is still so much more affordable that some of the other options.
- Lack of USB functionality. It can be done, but additional hardware is required to get any sort of USB functionality out of these. The USB ports on the cluster are not for end user use.
We have everything from web servers to exchange running on our cluster; about 26 VM's running at any given time. Never had any sort of bottleneck or performance issues. Every test we have done has come back with flying colors. The only thing we have in house that we do not have some sort of VM for is SQL....and that is only because the DBA is old school and wants is physical for now. We have tested it with out DB and performance is not an issue....slowly but surely I will get him converted as well.
- Time savings is the #1 thing for me. If I get an alert in the middle of the night about some issue, I can remote in and be confident in restarting the VM and it coming up in a timely fashion. With physical I always worry that something in POST will prevent boot and then I have an hour drive at 2am to press a key on the keyboard.
- Being able to spin up a new server when some new project starts is great. Now I do not have to spend time configuring a new physical server, then wait for assembly and shipping, then install, then updates and config. As long as I am keeping my templates up to date properly, I can get the new machine up in under an hour.
- If I had continued with physical machines when we decided to go virtual, I would easily be at our initial investment costs by now. Plus you add the cost of space, electric and cooling....not to mention being able to spin up more VM's as needed....and I would be well over twice the initial costs.
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.
Using Scale Computing HC3
120 - We have servers across all lines of our business on the HC3 platform. Accounting, Web Servers, File Servers, SQL, Exchange, etc. The vast majority of the users are unaware of them even being virtual, but they absolutely love the reboot time anytime maintenance is required.
2 - Both our Systems Administrator and CTO support as needed. We are an SMB that currently has only the SysAdmin doing support for the entire organization. As the SysAdmin, I have been able to walk our CFO through a few support tasks while I was out of the office. It is an incredibly easy platform to support and the only 2 times that I required support from the Scale team, our issues were resolved very quickly.