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Solid option for SMBs who don't want to spend their time administering virtual environments.
January 11, 2018

Solid option for SMBs who don't want to spend their time administering virtual environments.

J. Power Hely | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

We use a Scale cluster as our primary computing infrastructure, hosting SQL, ERP, WMS, RDS Cluster, file storage, IIS, and some other minor server VMs. All our VMs are currently MS OSs.
  • Ease of setup and operation. We have a very small IT bench, and these individuals are not virtual infrastructure engineers. They have little to no experience in VM environments. Yet they have no problems standing up VMs, setting up or modifying replication, cloning, shifting VMs to other nodes, etc. They can modify resource draw easily (with one notable exception) and generally can stay out of the VM management world and stay in the server and application management worlds.
  • Hardware support. I can only recall one hardware issue we had. Rather than going back and forth, or trying to fix one part at a time to reduce costing, Scale had a new box to us I think the next day or the day after. Hard drive swap and we were back in business at 100%.
  • Tecahnical support. There are some minor headaches working outside of the normal hypervisor realms of Hyper-V/VMWare. But Scale support has been there to help us whenever we hit one of those stumbling blocks.
  • Modifying the size of an instantiated virtual hard drive. You can change memory/cpus core with a few mouse clicks, but hard drive size increases are time consuming, complicated, and annoying in the current environment.
  • There is some room for improvement with regards to SQL writes. The hyperconverged solution is exceptional in durability and reliability, but large quantity small size SQL writes seem to cause a speed bottleneck larger than one would expect given the power of the architecture. Could be caused by spanning between nodes?
  • Not sure if this is a Scale issue or an MS issue, but we have never been able to clone an RD server with all apps installed and add it to the RDS cluster; we have to clone a barebones server, install everything and build all the printer connections, and then add it to the cluster.
We have had very few problems with our Scale boxes. Most were more "how can we do this" rather than "this doesn't work." When we have had a problem (software or the one hardware that I can remember, they were solved quickly, efficiently, and without all the "have you tried turning it off and on again? Please hold." Tier I aggravations that drive IT professionals up the walls.
SQL is our most critical app, and we have seen a substantial increase in its environmental footprint in the past year. Save for some frustrations in increasing drive size (much easier to plan ahead and make your drives large, or to just add a second drive and spread), we have been able to handle our growing pains with some after-hours reboots.

Similarly, we have doubled the amount of servers in our RDS environment.
  • Scale was a much more cost-effective option than other hyperconverged solutions we looked, or when compared to the cost of refreshing our previous environment of HP servers and a SAN. And that is before you look at the cost savings of not having to pay for a recurring VMWare license!
We looked at EMC's offerings (both storage and hyperconverged solutions) when making our decisions on hardware refresh two and a half years ago.
If you are a small to midsized company for whom cloud computing does not make financial sense (or a large company with reasons to keep things on-prem), Scale is a solid and cost-effective choice. It allows a low entry point, good scalability, and ease of operations even with a minimal IT team.