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Scale Computing HC3 Review
January 23, 2018

Scale Computing HC3 Review

Travis Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Customer support at Scale is outstanding overall. My only complaint would be there are several alerts and notices with ambiguous terminology that have a tendency to generate panic. To further the problem, the guides available through the customer portal do not do a good job of explaining what is going on exactly and often have statements saying you can ignore the problem. If I can ignore the problem, then why am I getting alerts about it?
Scale Computing HC3 is being used across the organization to host several virtual server instances. It helps address our need for multiple, specialized, virtual servers, including redundant domain controllers, file servers, document management and enterprise resource planning servers. The separation of these server roles allows for finer control of potential downtime and reduces end-user impact.
  • Virtual machine snapshots are an absolute breeze to create, store and recover if needed.
  • The interface is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.
  • Remote virtual machine management can be completed completely through a web interface rather than Remote Desktop Services, reducing our vulnerability footprint.
  • The amount of RAM you specify when ordering the system is not completely available for virtual machines. You need to calculate the ability for VMs to fail over to remaining nodes in the event a single node fails.
  • Integration with backup product vendors is severely lacking, causing difficulty in backing up full snapshots off site.
  • The interface login is a simple username and password. It would be nice to integrate two-factor authentication to increase security.
I have run Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and DFS on multiple servers with complete fail over. Additionally, I am running enterprise resource management, document management, a web server and auditing/monitoring on separate server instances all on the same Scale cluster. Overall the system is running flawlessly. Additionally, I have the peace of mind that the hardware is fault tolerant as well, providing instant fail over protection in the event a node goes down.
  • When considering providing the ability to provide redundancy and fail over protection, nothing comes close to Scale for overall price. As a comparison, we considered getting two physical servers as opposed to this Scale system. We found that, in order to provide the computing power needed, each server would be in the area of $15k each, before operating systems. Additionally, each server would need to handle multiple services and applications that can cause problems when run on the same machine.
  • We have immediately felt the positive impact this system has provided as we lost the outgoing server sooner than anticipated. I was able to immediately regain control of the domain, finalize the move and retire the old system with little impact to the end-user.
When researching hyperconverged technology, we looked at several leading providers. In each case, the cost of the system far outweighed Scale Computing's, without providing any additional benefits that we could discern. In some cases, the same price at Scale would only purchase 2 nodes at another vendor, reducing our fail over redundancy. In other cases, only the hyperconvergence software was provided. When comparing prices to purchase the individual machines plus the software, Scale came out ahead again by a large margin.
Scale Computing HC3 is very well suited to the medium business running multiple, complex business applications needing separation of server instances. Additionally, the ability to create seamless fail over and redundancy make Scale Computing HC3 an ideal choice for business continuity.

Scale Computing HC3's price point makes it a difficult sell to smaller business who may have a need, but not the capital to invest at this level.