Reduce Your IT Headache with Scale Computing HC3
December 18, 2017
Reduce Your IT Headache with Scale Computing HC3
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
We use Scale Computing HC3 across all departments within the City of Hudson. The main reason we went with it was because of its built-in replication ability to other Scale Computing clusters, which is perfect for not only a backup solution but also as a disaster recovery solution.
- I marvel that I can create a new VM, give it an IP address, a name, and join it to the domain all in about 10 minutes. After the first 3 or 4 VMs, I realized that I can take that freshly installed VM and just clone it to have new VMs under two minutes! I now have a VM that is strictly for cloning to make a new VM servers.
- If a user accidentally deletes a file, I can clone that VM from a snapshot in about two minutes to recover the file. Or, depending on the replication schedule, I can retrieve the file from another clusters just as quickly.
- The dashboard for the cluster has great gauges to show the usages of the CPUs, RAM, Disk space, and IOPS. It also has a box for each node in the cluster to show which VMs are on which node and its RAM and disk usages.
- There is a tile for each VM that also has its own set of gauges to Disk, CPU, and network usage.
- I like that I manage the cluster from a web browser instead of a KVM in a rack.
- The gauges for the cluster could be improved. The Disk Space usage shows the total disk space before the RAID and not the actual usable amount after the RAID. The RAM cluster show a total off 188GB but show be 192GB; each cluster has 64GB of RAM and I have three clusters.
Our police department has squad car and body cameras that require lots of storage space. Scale Computing HC3 does an excellent job in handling the resources needed for the ability to access those videos without buffering or connectivity/accessibility issues when numerous people are trying to view videos or while videos are being uploaded to the server.
- With Scale Computing HC3, we have been able to provide better IT services to the departments in our city. We are able to allocate more hardware resources to all applications to improve the user experience.
- We are better suited for taking on new applications and new storage needs knowing that we can easily install another node to the cluster rather than trying to upgrade existing hard drives to larger sizes. This allows us to better help other departments provide services to the citizens of our city.
- With Scale Computing HC3, we have been able to combine three different systems/solutions into one; our servers, our backup solution, and our disaster recovery solution. With two clusters in different locations (soon to be three), it is the perfect system for all three solutions and has saved us tens of thousands of dollars.
We looked into various systems but the one that stood out was a Unitrends backup system and I liked what I saw at the time. But when I discovered Scale Computing HC3, I realized I could get more out of it than Unitrends and at a lower cost. Scale has reduced the number of devices we have had to learn to use and maintain, the number of vendors we have had to use, and reduced the overall cost of our infrastructure.