Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Waddilove

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Scale across the whole organization - a trend started by our head office in Germany to fully virtualize our entire server-based network.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Snapshots - CoW makes things very quick and painless.
Replication to another cluster - Painlessly simple and reliable.
Replication to the cloud - Similarly simple with added peace of mind.
Ease of use - Even for someone highly technical, it is nice to "take a break" from the crazy options of VMWare and others to just have a basic-controlled hypervisor.

Cons

Cost - While I understand support/maintenance makes up a large part of it, the cost for expanding RAM, for example, in an existing cluster is several times more than if you were maintaining hardware yourself.
Licensing (Microsoft) - Could use assistance from Scale in determining/calculating the best Microsoft license layout (how many cores? how many CPUs? datacenter vs standard?).
USB - While not a complete necessity, it would be nice to have a feature to map a USB port/device to a virtual machine. The hardware itself has several USB ports but none are really usable. Digi USB Anywhere worked well for our case, but still, it would be nice to do the odd data dump/backup/restore via USB drive (ex. really old project reference from the 1990s stored on external USB).

Support has always been awesome - quick resolution times, quick call back times, generally short wait queue. Staff regularly follow-up on tickets even if generally unnecessary (i.e. we know this is the solution to your problem, but would you like us to follow-up tomorrow to make sure it did indeed work and nothing else is outstanding?). Have had to deal with them both during business hours as well as after hours. After hours support was just as awesome as business hours - really nice when you call back and someone remembers who you are/what problem you had and you don't have to completely re-explain it from scratch. Techs are also very technical, I "click" with most of them almost right away.

Return on Investment

So far the primary ROI has been in electricity usage. The sheer number of physical servers we were able to power down after moved to the cluster has reduced our monthly power bill by approximately 20%.
Being able to remotely manage the cluster has been a huge perk. Some days where I would typically work from home have been squashed by the need to come to the office to physically restart a single-host server. This has not been an issue since the switch to Scale.

Alternatives Considered

VMware ESXi

We did previously have VMWare licensing but it was so old (5.1) it did not seem worth it to try and upgrade it.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it's well suited to all but the most critical workloads - VMWare may benefit from added speed using proper drive controllers and SSDs, but I find Scale Computing HC3 to be the best "run of the mill" software available.

Comments

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Scale Computing HC3 - First Time User Review