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Scale HC3 - The value in hyper-converged computing
June 12, 2017

Scale HC3 - The value in hyper-converged computing

Lee Zimmerman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

We are using Scale across our entire corporation which includes retail, wholesale and manufacturing entities. We run a mixture of Debian Linux and Windows Server 2012r2 with 27 VMs total. We have appreciated the performance improvements and flexibility of a single large storage pool after migrating from a solution where we had several standalone servers hosting VMs.
  • HC3 makes it dead easy to clone a VM from a snapshot and get it up and running using their simple web interface.
  • The HC3 dashboard allows one to see at a glance the major indicators of server utilization across the cluster.
  • Spinning up a new VM based on a template makes the job of adding a new server easy and quick.
  • HC3 does not offer guaranteed support for Debian Linux, however we have not run into any significant issues despite using it heavily in production.
Each time we have initiated contact with Scale Computing by phone our call has been answered by a Scale engineer who has then walked us through answering our question or resolving our issue. If the issue was not an immediate fix they have stayed with us through resolution offering timely updates along the way.
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.
  • Purchasing a Scale Cluster, instead of one off server from Dell, has allowed us to rapidly expand our server base without managing or maintaining a mixture of hardware models. This took a substantial up-front investment but over the life-cycle of the cluster is expected to result in reduced cost.
We evaluated offerings from HP/SimpliVity, Dell-EMC/VxRail Appliances and Nutanix. We choose Scale based on them being the best value for our needs. One of the way's Scale does this is by not requiring a separate hypervisor with additional licensing. Also they are less unreasonable with their hardware margins.
HC3 may not be well suited for small businesses that are only running a basic server or two. However once a business grows beyond that point Scale will be a competitive option.