Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Scale cluster manages the virtual machines which all employees utilize.
Currently only the IT team, which consists of 6 members, interacts with the Scale environment directly.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Simple VM management interface
Provides easy access to support streams
Immediate system performance and alerting

Cons

A granular user management system is required. The Scale interface lacks the ability to add user accounts with limited access to manage individual or groups of VMs. Remote access is an all or nothing security model.
VM export is missing. An ability to export a VM from a cluster for external backup or transfer to another cluster which is not linked is also not supported.

They are very accessible and knowledgeable. I've not had to deal with hardware faults, so I can't rate based on critical issue handling, but software updates and general support is easy and professionally handled.

Return on Investment

Upon initial installation we were able to migrate 10 physical servers into the cluster of three. This had the immediate benefit of a reduced electrical and thermal load in the data center.

Alternatives Considered

VMware ESXi and Oracle VM VirtualBox

The user interface and maintenance agreement was more attractive to us than other available products.
Scale offered both a hardware and software solution while others would provide either one or the other.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scale is a user friendly VM cluster which offers redundancy across hardware devices which protects against a full system failure. This is well suited to environments with multiple servers.

Comments

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Craig Theriac
(Vendor Representative) commented 7 years ago
In case others come across this review, as of 8.0 HC3 offers Role Based Access Control for control over which users have access to which features (including a full read-only mode). On the export side, users are able to export VMs to an SMB share as a full VM that can be reimported later on. Many customers make use of this feature for backup purposes and to make use of existing infrastructure like a NAS that still has a useful life.

Scale is worth a look!