Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Justin Hall

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Scale Computing at our headquarters to host roughly 25 servers that range from application servers to file servers to domain controllers. Scale gave us simplicity to manage our infrastructure. It's also saving us on the bottom line.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The replication of VMs betweens nodes is incredibly fast. We can recover servers from snapshots very quickly.
We are saving on VMWare costs by not having to renew licenses for VMWare.
With Scale's next update, we'll have the capability to do file level restoration.

Cons

When migrating to Scale, it seemed like we we're basically 'tricking' the virtual machine into being a Scale file. So the ability to more easily migrate to Scale would be recommended.
As of right now, to restore a file, we basically restore an entire VM from a snapshot rather than restoring just that file.
A lesser option should be available for smaller offices that only have 2 virtual servers.

Support Rating

Scale support has been fantastic. We've only used support during our initial migration and they went above and beyond to help us.

Apps Run

We currently run all of our domain environment in Scale and several application servers. It's mostly file sharing and print services. We haven't noticed any decline in performance since moving to Scale.

Return on Investment

We're saving $15k per year alone in just hardware support costs
We're saving even more by no longer needing VMWare.
Upgrading Scale takes a lot less man hours than upgrading VMWare.

Alternatives Considered

Nimble, HPE Proliant ML and VMware ESXi

We have one system now rather than 3. We're able to do everything we need to from one management screen

Likelihood to Recommend

Cost alone, we no longer have VMware licenses, we could possibly move away from Veeam in the near future. Managing snapshots is much easier than VMWare. A non-technical person could learn Scale in less than a day.

Comments

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Craig Theriac
(Vendor Representative) commented 6 years ago
Thanks for taking the time to give a review! There's an upcoming release that will allow for single file restore and it's pretty slick. Also, on the low-cost remote option...we have support for a single node system when High Availability isn't required (replicate back to another cluster for full VM failover), but we are looking at other things on the backlog to allow for a low-cost solution with full HA. Let me know if you would like to set up a roadmap call to see the file restore in action and/or discuss the timeline of a low-cost remote office hardware config. Thanks again for posting the review!

More Scale Please