Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
We use Scale across the whole organization - a trend started by our head office in Germany to fully virtualize our entire server-based network.
- 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.
- 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).
The biggest change for us (on the engineering side) was the consolidation of our Siemens TeamCenter servers. We were able to go from 4 physical machines down to a Scale HC3 cluster of 3 nodes (3 physical machines), and on top of that, I am able to run several other servers from this cluster all without affecting the overall performance of TeamCenter. This has allowed us to ultimately turn off 11 old single-host hardware servers in place of our overall two clusters of 3 nodes each (totaling 6 physical machines). The cost savings in power alone has been pretty massive.
- 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.
We did previously have VMWare licensing but it was so old (5.1) it did not seem worth it to try and upgrade it.