Scale: It allowed us to triple our business size without tripling our IT costs.
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
We use our scale systems for virtual machine hosting. It allows redundancy, failover, and DR in a simple, speedy way that we did not get from our Citrix or Windows-based virtual environments.
Pros
- Speed of new machine deployment: using prebuilt stored clones we can deploy servers virtually within seconds and have them doing their jobs.
- Redundancy: our DR is simplified and allowed above the 99.9999% uptime we all strive for.
- Support: immediate support, remotely built into the OS with a very fast turnaround for any problems.
Cons
- The GUI is very limited in its end-user scope, many times we have had minor problems that we could have fixed ourselves but needed Scale to access the system remotely to fix or advise.
- Parts needed to come quickly, but the company is U.S. based mostly. Having more parts in UK would mean an even faster turn around.
- When there have been more advanced problems, the GUI and reporting is quite limited. More info could be given to the end user if there was the ability to do so.
- ROI has been much more positive than originally forecast.
- We have maintained much more uptime than with previous virtual environments.
- IT time is greatly reduced in the maintenance and creation of new or additional servers.
- Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) and Hyper-V
Citrix was our oldest virtual environment and it was tired when we retired it fully. But when testing newer systems it would have taken more time and was not as easily adaptable to grow our system. Hyper-V may be the basic MS virtual environment but the configuration of LUNs and Sans to provide storage would have escalated our time enormously.


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