Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Brad Fulmer

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Scale for our primary and DR compute, storage and backup needs. It has helped to greatly reduce the overhead that the previous VMware system it replaced created.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Simplicity, everything in one interface.
Backup and restore.

Cons

The main interface is somewhat basic, missing details about each VM and the system as a whole that other solutions provide. Disk throughput and the ability to see a detailed breakdown of each VM on a host, to name a couple.
The ability to clone install media(ISO files) between clusters would be nice.

Their Support team is excellent. They were a big help during the install and it is easy to reach them by phone or email if you have a problem. They are all based in the US and respond quickly. This is a rarity today. You will certainly not get this kind of service from the likes of DELL, HP, or VMware without paying a great deal of money to buy one of their premium tier products like vxRail.

Apps Run

We run all of our production DBs, case management, document management, Exchange, and most other primary systems on Scale. Performance has never been an issue. We have a 4 node cluster in production and a 3 node cluster in DR. Auto load balancing works well.

Return on Investment

It has greatly increased our performance coming from an aging Cisco UCS solution.
It makes day to day management much easier than VMware. Everything is in one easy to use interface that is very responsive.

Alternatives Considered

We looked at VxRail from DELL EMC. SCALE was able to come very close to the performance at a fraction of the cost and the simplicity on the interface compared to vSphere/vCenter is what really sold us.

Likelihood to Recommend

For small and medium businesses it's hard to beat. It's very simple to install, move you're VMs to, and manage. You have computing, storage, and backups/replication all in 1 blade/cluster. I can see it being a bit of a challenge in larger corporations due to the lack of some advanced features provided by VMware and others.

User Experience with Scale Computing

Key Insights

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

Usability

The system is very accessible. You can easily create and manage VMs, change resource allocation and monitor the utilization of the environment. Snapshot and Replication management is also easy to setup and use. You can restore a single partition or entire vm in seconds. Alarms and alerts are also easy to access and are far clearer at pointing out what needs attention than VMware. It would be nice to have a more granular view of somethings such as which VMs use a specific snapshot schedule though.

Exceptional Examples of Scale Computing Platform Support

Just yesterday, 11-23-2020, we had an alert that there was an issue with the file system of the cluster. I was able to get an engineer from Scale on the phone in less than 5 minutes and in around 15 minutes we determined the cause of the issue and resolved the case.

Another instance was about 2 weeks ago when I spoke to their customer feedback team who very closely listening to some of the pain points I had with the user interface and the desire to add additional features to it. Scale had around 6 people on their side join the call and I really felt like they cared about what I had to say.

Comments

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SCALE: Affordable HCI for the Masses.