Scale Computing HC3 Hyperconverged systems enabled our organisational change
Updated November 25, 2020
Scale Computing HC3 Hyperconverged systems enabled our organisational change
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
The primary use case for the Scale Computing HC3 platform was for delivery of VDIs for a specific organisational design activity across two disparate companies. There was little integration at that point and the 2 large organisations had legacy environments that it was/still is hard to integrate (because of scale/cost).
The business team re-organisations were large scale and had been under NDA so minimal preparation could be undertaken. The project had already set a budget in advance.
Therefore we needed a quick to deliver, cost effective way of providing the environments, with DR, within each organisation, for use by employees from the other organisation.
To this end we deployed 16 x Lenovo based Scale HC3 appliances, 4 to each of 4 data centres with each pair of data centres belonging to the individual companies. In this way, we hit the timescales, hit the budget and provided a robust solution hosting, in total, circa 1200 VDIs complete with a replicated DR instance
The business team re-organisations were large scale and had been under NDA so minimal preparation could be undertaken. The project had already set a budget in advance.
Therefore we needed a quick to deliver, cost effective way of providing the environments, with DR, within each organisation, for use by employees from the other organisation.
To this end we deployed 16 x Lenovo based Scale HC3 appliances, 4 to each of 4 data centres with each pair of data centres belonging to the individual companies. In this way, we hit the timescales, hit the budget and provided a robust solution hosting, in total, circa 1200 VDIs complete with a replicated DR instance
- As an appliance, it comes ready built and with all licenses included. No VMWare, no vCentre, no fiddly build steps
- On site resilience is built in to the cluster - and it works; as does cross site replication for BCP/DR
- Remote support and the pre tested upgrade facility are good and work - our outsourcers hate it as it doesn't need much outside a service desk call to have some Scale
- Cross site VM migration is a feature on the roadmap we are looking forward to
- When dealing with hundreds of VMs all needing the same change e.g. replication settings, being able to select those as a group or set would have been a good timesaver
- Accessibility to external monitoring could be simpler - it takes a support call to turn it on. Whilst it is understandable that end users are kept away from the configs that make it work, some elements such as simple SNMP names and trap settings could be menu driven.
End user compute for key business processes is what we use the platform for, not critical applications themselves.
- Meeting tight timescales at an affordable price meant our business re-organisation was able to actually occur.
- Outsource support teams are confused by it - because of its simplicity - they keep trying to make something more complex than it is to keep earning unjustified fees
- Being able to carry out rolling upgrades with live users on the cluster went just fine
We had looked at hyperconverged systems from Nutanix, HPE (Simplivity) and NetApp - all wanted a very high premium on top of which there were still additional licenses.
Their individual high costs meant they were never viable despite some attractive feature sets.
Their individual high costs meant they were never viable despite some attractive feature sets.
User Experience with Scale Computing
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
During COVID we have really exercised our use of the 5 clusters in production, especially for VDI deployments, and this led to some performance overhead.
Scale support "dialed in" using the built in "user initiated dial out only" support channel to run performance tests and were able to provide practical advice including an upgrade to the cluster software that would fix a Windows 10 vCPU performance issue.
They did a through job and the subsequent upgrade; also easy; produced the results we were looking for in returning the performance levels to where they needed to be
Scale support "dialed in" using the built in "user initiated dial out only" support channel to run performance tests and were able to provide practical advice including an upgrade to the cluster software that would fix a Windows 10 vCPU performance issue.
They did a through job and the subsequent upgrade; also easy; produced the results we were looking for in returning the performance levels to where they needed to be
Using Scale Computing HC3
2000 - Various as the Scale systems host generic VDI access specifically but these range in use from range planning, digital operations and others, including offshore IT support
Support is a remote service delivered by Scale, including, via IBM in our case, the Lenovo hardware support. Therefore there is no "support" needed per-se, rather there are occasional admin activities to carry out and that is just another activity our IT outsourcer provides on an adhoc basis.
There is no full time admin on it as it does not require it
There is no full time admin on it as it does not require it
- VDI
- high levels of resilience
- simple geographic disaster recovery
- no extra licences to procure (e.g. non VMWare etc.)
- Multi site VDI resilience with dynamic DNS re-registration delivering automatic portability
- zero touch remote site deployments across hundreds of locations