How we benefited from our Scale HC3 cluster
June 20, 2017
How we benefited from our Scale HC3 cluster
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
We are currently using our HC3 cluster as our production environment for the corporation. We have migrated all but a handful of systems to the cluster with excellent results. We migrated from a stand alone Hyper-V system to address the fail over problems we were having. The system has performed better than expected, allowing us to migrate additional systems in to the cluster as well as expanding and adding an additional node.
- Fail over and load balancing - Having used a basic Hyper-V system with no clustering and no fail over, this was a selling point to migrate to the HC3.
- Expansion - The process to add an additional node was seamless. Ordered the node, once it arrived gave support a call. Walked thru the process during production hours and was migrating systems over to it within a couple of hours. Could not ask for a simpler process.
- Dashboard - The improvements to the dashboard have been great. The ability to monitor is "real time" the IOPs of the system and individual nodes as well as their processor load have helped us track down issues that might have been missed otherwise.
- The issues that we had early on have been addressed by their support staff. As we have found something that we wanted the system to do they have been very supportive and worked them into their road map. Such as disk usage display and IOPs.
- Multiple User Support - This is one feature that would be nice to get implemented. Single account with admin rights has limited who has access to the system to help support end users. The ability to create user accounts with varying level of access would be beneficial.
We are currently running 2 SQL instances and the results have been great. We have support systems running as well, but the value has been in the database systems running.
- System downtime outside of scheduled updates has gone away. We were struggling with our old system as the age of the system caught up we were experiencing more and more down time. Even once age is equivalent on this system I have a comfort level that if we have a node go down the fail over is so smooth that users will not be affected by the outage.
- We were so happy with the HC3 system and the benefits that it brought that we updated one of our other systems to another scale unit. The remote management and console support has allowed us to keep our lean staffing and still have up time numbers to be proud of.
After reviewing several options, including upgrading our Hyper-V setup. We determined that the Cost vs Benefit for our setup fell directly to the Scale HC3. We were in a situation where we needed new hardware and new software, so with the other options we were still looking at the cost of new hardware, purchasing the software, and installation/learning of software. The simplicity of the HC3 and the support team that we talked with prior to purchase made the decision easy.
Scale Computing HC3 Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - Yes, once we talked with support, they informed us that they were aware of the bug and had already started working on a resolution. We received a call back and they actually monitored the installation of the new version of software to verify nothing happened during the process.