Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HC3 replaced our entire VMware stack of 3 host servers and 2 storage arrays. It hosts our Windows AD structural component servers (DHCP, DNS, AD Services) as well as a number of admin servers (security system, phone system, etc.). We went this route as a more cost-effective means, compared to a complete stack refresh.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ease of setup: OOB setup was minimal and could be done by following the supplied Quick Start, although support was available.
Ease of use: deploying new resources or repurposing/cloning resources is super simple, with a clear GUI that is very intuitive.
Peace of mind: having a 3-node system with distributed compute and storage means more redundancy in case of any single component failure. Having all that run as part of the "OS" of the system is even better, as it's baked in: there's no set up like with a multi-home VMware implementation.
Great ROI: compared to a stack refresh, the HC3 came in at more than 50% less.

Cons

It could have been a bit easier to migrate existing VMs or physical machines into the cluster. Using Double Take was OK, but a bit expensive and somewhat tricky.

Support Rating

I've gotten a great response from the support team. I will say that there have been times when the person who responded didn't know the answer, but their willingness to respond regardless, even just to tell me they're finding someone who can help, is fantastic and not the norm in my experience. Pre-sales support, both for sales and technical, was excellent; they were always ready to make resources available to answer questions on pricing, support, and usage.

Return on Investment

As mentioned, ROI was great: an immediate cashflow savings of over $50,000 versus a hardware refresh, plus the benefits of capitalizing it over time.
No license fees like other hypervisor vendors means we have saved a lot of money since go-live, which we could "bank" toward adding additional nodes should we need additional compute or storage.

Likelihood to Recommend

As a simpler, more cost-effective way to virtualize your infrastructure, I don't see a place this couldn't fit in well. While we aren't running any dedicated database-based applications (and so can't really speak to I/O contention or speed issues), several of our admin machines are running MS SQL Server and have not experienced any performance issues. Because of its expandability, I could see this in a smaller shop like ours, or as a niche in a larger infrastructure, or, if scaled properly, as a replacement for a large infrastructure VM host.

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Scale Computing's HC3: Hyper-converged Computing for Everyone!