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Scale Computing HC3 Review
June 07, 2017

Scale Computing HC3 Review

Mike Slates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

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  • Setup was easy with Scale's assistance. Rack, connect, and they walk you through establishing the cluster. Then, it just runs! Upload your OS ISO's and you're off and running.
  • VM creation is a extremely quick and easy. Modification of CPU/RAM/Disk of existing VM's is also easy.
  • High availability. If one node goes down all the VM's on that node automatically migrate to other nodes. (I haven't had any issues with the boxes, so this hasn't occurred. But, firmware upgrades do take individual cluster nodes offline during the upgrade process, so that simulates it.)
  • Performance. We're running 25 VM's on our 4-node Scale HC3 cluster. We have the middle tier platform, HC2000 with SAS drives and 10 Gb NICs, and the performance has been excellent.
  • Reduction of physical servers, power, and heat. We used to have 2 full racks of physical servers, plus several remote servers. All using power and generating heat. Now, we could fit everything in a half rack.
  • Support. Scale's support team is outstanding. Every time I call or open a ticket on their support portal, I get a response immediately. And it's by a team of well-trained professionals, speaking English, based in Indiana!
  • Ability to grow. Just add a node to the cluster. Boom! Extra CPU/RAM/Disk available immediately. And you can add nodes while the cluster is running.
  • Disaster Recovery. We added 2 DR nodes at a remote site and are replicating snapshots of all our servers nightly. This was a huge win for us, as we've been struggling with BCP/DR for years.
  • Cannot modify CPU/RAM/Disk while a VM is running. Not a huge Con in my book, since I don't have a lot of need for this.
  • Took them a while add support for Windows Server 2016(and Windows 10).
I mentioned this as one of my Pros. Their support team is great. Quick to answer the phone. And the person you talk to is always knowledgeable.
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.

  • The Scale HC3 cluster has moved us into a high-availability server setup that keeps our servers/apps online. It's hard to quantify this in terms of dollars, but having all of our apps up and running is invaluable to the company.
  • As mentioned in the Pros, we implemented Scale builtin Snapshot/Replication feature to send server snapshots to 2 off-site DR nodes every night. If a catastrophe were to happen at our main site, we could be up and running with all of our servers within minutes to hours at our DR site. Not days/weeks via the old disk/tape restore method. Not having our servers up and running for a week or more could stress the business to the breaking point. Same as the bullet point above, this feature is invaluable to the company.
  • Reduction of power and heat. I didn't calculate the savings, but we reduced our physical server footprint from around 20 to 4. This saves on power, both on the draw by the servers and by less running of the air conditioning units.
We selected Scale over the two mentioned companies based on price, support, ease of use, user reviews, and customer reference calls to Scale customers. It was over 2 years ago that I did the research, so I'm sure some things have changed. But, I'm happy with our selection of Scale Computing. They've been a great company to partner with and serve the SMB market well.
If you're a small/medium sized business and looking to do a server refresh, I would definitely look at Scale. They have simplified my server setup substantially, and made everything a lot easier and more reliable.
If you're looking at implementing a SAN backend with Hyper-V or VMWare, look at a Hyper-Converged vendor like Scale. You'll probably save money and have a much simpler setup.