Item: Scale Computing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Raymond Bilton

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Scale HC3 is being used for our whole organization and is running various VM machines, including Active Directory, File server and some smaller machines. The two biggest things we wanted were fast recovery (having experienced our file server being down due to an bad update) and a reliable DRP solution.
The Scale HC3 solution checked these boxes very easily, providing us hourly backups on our file server and by using an HC3 node in a remote location with an extremely easy interface!

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to learn and use user interface.
Personal one-on-one walk-through hardware installation.
Very personal training for our organization (which included recording for review later if we missed or forgot something) with a Scale expert.

Cons

Ability to use the USB storage devices (for transfer of large quantity of files on USB devices).
Ability to use multiple networks (such as a machine that needs access to the LAN and public internet using two different network cards).

Support Rating

The personal hand holding from equipment setup to GUI introduction for our organization is best in class.

Return on Investment

Moving from physical MS Window servers to virtual MS Servers running on Scale Computing HC3 in essence provided us with more MS Server licenses automatically.
Whether unboxing, setting up a new machine and installing its OS, or performing machine recoveries, time to complete tasks are counted in minutes now, instead of hours.
Scale Computing HC3 software updates are applied to one machine at a time, with you in control of each node upgrade, and no downtime to the VMs as it automatically moves the VMs around to allow updates to be applied that need a node to be rebooted.

Alternatives Considered

I used both Promox and VMWare in very limited means previously, and each require a decision on the hardware you're purchasing to complement it. Scale Computing HC3 comes complete, with the software and hardware perfectly matched, at an affordable price. And when Scale Computing HC3 is telling it's scalable, by simply adding a machine to scale up, and it joins the existing cluster (just point the new server to the IP of a machine in the existing cluster), take that to the bank! No OS or software to install, it simply powers up, you answer a few questions and it becomes part of your cluster!

Likelihood to Recommend

Scale Computing HC3 is very well suited for small-medium sized businesses looking for a redundancy solution that is simply "easy to use" without getting bogged down in licensing costs. The speed of starting up a new machine, whether for testing purposes or for production, is so quick, that I can take a request and provide a new machine within minutes. Allowing IT to not be a stepping stone to get a project up and running, but a gas pedal that drives the business forward.

Comments

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Simply can't beat it!