HC3 - Truly a breath of fresh air.
Updated March 29, 2019
HC3 - Truly a breath of fresh air.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
In a multi-site, highly secure industrial control environment, we needed a solution that would simplify administration, provide test/development cloning capability, N+1 redundancy, and allow for host replication between sites for disaster recovery. Scale's HC3 delivered everything as promised and the solution truly is easy enough for a non-system administrator to manage on a day-to-day basis. Scale is an absolute home run for SCADA/ICS infrastructure, and offers unprecedented flexibility, especially if upgrading from a non-virtualized infrastructure.
Pros
- The world's simplest host and storage administration, period.
- Built-in site-to-site replication for one-click DR.
- Excellent performance, easily surpassing the "big guys" -- more cost-conscious hardware solutions get the job done just as well, if not better, than top-tier systems using much more expensive hardware.
- A support experience that cannot be rivaled. Just open a trouble ticket and see for yourself!
Cons
- At-rest encryption currently requires a 3rd-party product.
- Would really benefit from a user interface or wizard for creating boot media/migrating common hosts to HC3 (maybe options for physical, Hyper-V, VMWare).
- Prior to using HC3, our disaster recovery options were limited to replicating to out-buildings. With HC3 we now also replicate hosts to our other facilities, ensuring continuity should the worst occur.
- Managing an environment consisting entirely of physical hosts is time-consuming and limiting, since CPU and storage resources cannot be easily adjusted based on needs.
- Control technicians can perform nearly all system administrator functions, eliminating the need for a dedicated system administrator -- instead, we share our corporate system administrator resources to provide escalation support when needed.
As a long-time HPE shop, we did look at Simplivity (even knowing that HPE's lackadaisical support was likely to poison Simplivity post-acquisition), but we were very underwhelmed by the demonstrator's lack of expertise in the product, and some basic limitations surrounding the offering.
Nutanix was incredibly expensive when comparing apples-to-apples, and did not provide any meaningful advantages over other options.
As a corporate VMWare shop, we also looked at this option, but to achieve our goals, we would need several 3rd party products and full-time administrator training and expertise to adequately manage the environment, making the total cost of ownership prohibitively expensive.
Nutanix was incredibly expensive when comparing apples-to-apples, and did not provide any meaningful advantages over other options.
As a corporate VMWare shop, we also looked at this option, but to achieve our goals, we would need several 3rd party products and full-time administrator training and expertise to adequately manage the environment, making the total cost of ownership prohibitively expensive.
Using Scale Computing HC3
150 - HC3 supports a 4-site industrial / process control system; there are two analysts responsible for the health of the SCADA environment, with about 150 total system users.
2 - These analysts, with no formal system administrator training or experience, simply shadowed the implementer and asked questions as needed. Since go-live, they have been able to manage the environment with no additional support.
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