Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Greg Madden, CISSP

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used across the whole organization. We use it as our core VM platform. It is a major component of our Disaster Recovery policy as well with live snapshot replication. The capability to live migrate between nodes and to instantly spin up snapshots made this an easy decision for my organization

Pros and Cons

Snapshotting - Scale is great at scheduled snapshots to add a layer of redundancy to any DR plan. it can also send snapshots to a remote scale system to act as a VM platform and a DR platform all at once
Cloning - If there is an issue with a machine, it is extremely easy to clone it and work on it outside of production
Ease of use - overall getting it set up required 2 or 3 command line commands and the nodes did all the work themselves. Uploading ISOs is easier in Scale than any other hypervisor I've ever used
Replication - We utilize a second set of nodes in our DR site that all core servers replicate to hourly. We have never had an issue with failed replications over a VPN

More support for importing VMs from XenCenter
I wish the main interface was more organized, I know the users can make it very organized by using tags and such, but by default, it is very chaotic
Better logs for admins to understand what is going on. The current logs don't let us know anything outside of knowing we need to contact support
The ability to expand drive size instead of requiring cloning

Support Rating

They are very quick to contact us when we put in a ticket and they work to resolution quickly

Apps Run

Everything from active directory to banking software. It is easy to scale up, not so much to scale down.

Return on Investment

The best overall thing I can say about Scale is the increased DR support. If something fails with the scheduled snapshots we have a 10-minute recovery window so we never lose more than 10 minutes of data.

Likelihood to Recommend

Any virtual environment, scale works great. highly recommended based on my experience with it

Key Insights

Do you think Scale Computing Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Scale Computing Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Scale Computing Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Scale Computing Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Scale Computing Platform again?

Yes

Usability

I was not a part of the purchase or demo team so i had never even touched it when they brought it in to our company to use. Within 3 minutes of just looking at the interface, I figured out how to do pretty much everything. It is extremely intuitive and even for those without much experience in virtualization, Scale is a wonderful solution.

Exceptional Examples of Scale Computing Platform Support

When we initiated the rollout, there was one issue in the way we configured one of the scale devices. We were having issues getting the two stacks to link up and Scale came in and found the error in the setup config within 20 minutes. They really know what they are looking for and how to find it.

Disaster Recovery

Scale is wonderful, not only as a virtualization platform but for increased DR capabilities as well.

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3