Scale Computing HC3 - A Review from the IT Trenches
June 06, 2017
Scale Computing HC3 - A Review from the IT Trenches
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
Scale Computing HC3 (Scale) is used company wide. Scale was selected as our primary hypervisor. Before Scale, we were a pure physical server shop. With the power of Scale we were able to convert our physical servers to virtual servers (P2V) with minimal effort. The tools that were supplied by Scale aided in the P2V process. We were able to convert nearly our entire Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to virtual in under a week. The Scale environment controls 99% of our IT solutions.
- Scale offers what is known as hyperconvergence. Hyperconvergence is a combination of hypervisor, storage, and networking all in one appliance.
- Creating a new virtual machine takes about 40 seconds to complete. In the past, spinning up a new server would take days.
- Scale offers the ability to create snapshots of virtual machines both manually and automatically.
- Scale offers the ability to create a development environment with ease. Simply clone the VM that you want to use, change a few setting related to networking and you are set!
- Scale reduces the TCO because processing power, networking, and storage are all contained in a single appliance.
- Replication is one of the areas that could be improved. Please do not get me wrong, replication works well but the interface is missing the ability to throttle bandwidth usage.
- Setup and configuration could be a bit simpler. However, Scale's support team is way above average and available. The only issue is having to schedule a time for configuration.
With Scale, we were able to migrate our entire ERP solution, which was hosted on three different physical servers, to Scale's virtual environment in two days! Scale's snapshot functionality allows us to create automatic snapshots of our ERP easily and efficiently. In addition to migrating our ERP solution we were able to migrate our Microsoft SQL servers to Scale which allowed us to reduce the number of physical servers and reduce MS SQL licensing requirements.
- Scale allowed our company to move from physical servers to virtual servers which help to position our company for future growth.
Scale's hyperconvergence was the most attractive aspect of Scale. With Microsoft's Hyper-V solution we only had the hypervisor and networking, a third party solution was required for storage. In addition, Scale's builtin redundancies are bar-none. There is nothing special that must be setup and/or configured for VM redundancy. If Scale detects an issue with one of the nodes in the cluster, VM are automatically migrated to different nodes and load balanced until the affected node is repaired.