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Scale Computing Platform -- inspired design and superlative support!
December 07, 2023

Scale Computing Platform -- inspired design and superlative support!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing Platform

We purchased our first Scale HC3 to eliminate a number of hardware servers in our Middle School campus. With a very limited staff we found it cumbersome and time consuming to keep servers up to date as hardware fell out of support and could no longer be upgraded.

The results were so positive and beneficial we purchased a second system for another campus and plan to add a third cluster in 2024.

  • Deploying new servers is ridiculously easy and fast. New servers require zero additional space or power.
  • Scale Computing Platform affords a powerful and convenient backup capability. Not only by snapshots of whole VMs, we can fetch individual files out of those snapshots.
  • Updates to the Scale Computing Platform itself are beautifully self-contained. The backend software moves VMs and processes between running nodes as they update and reboot. There are no user interruptions and no notifications of same are needed.
  • In my experience, we use Active Directory and Scale Computing Platform has yet to implement robust support for domain controller snapshots. This Microsoft feature (VM-Generation ID) allows a restored domain controller to properly re-integrate with AD.
In my opinion you could not ask for a better, or more dedicated, support team.
We run virtual domain controllers, several database applications as well as print sharing. We also virtualized an older, deprecated student information system. This allows us to access records from previous years without having to support (or worry about) the ancient hardware.
  • We have saved a tremendous amount of time and effort in the maintenance, upgrading and (eventual) replacement of hardware platforms.
  • Our resiliency is greatly enhanced via the use of snapshots. These can restore a server very quickly.
  • Overall performance is improved because the hypervisor intelligently allocates resources to the busiest VMs. No intervention needed.
  • Restarting a server is now much faster than with hardware.
We evaluated HP, VMware and Dell. These systems were all outside our budget (very substantially, in some cases) or required more management to deploy than Scale Computing Platform.

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

I can heartily recommend Scale Computing Platform for anyone looking into virtualization. If you've been in IT very long you'll appreciate the benefits and the pain points Scale Computing Platform can address with its elegant design. But the reason I have chosen the maximum 10 for my rating is my experience with the Scale Computing Platform support team. I'll describe two incidents in some detail: 1) A long term power outage caused a need to shut down VMs on the backend, under time pressure. We reached support via cellphone and they stayed with us throughout the process. We accessed the backend directly on the nodes while support recited the required command line statements. In the end we were able to shut down all the VMs, and then the nodes, gracefully. Bravo Scale! 2) We had an unsupported VM requirement (an old Red Hat Linux v5 server) which was a very tough nut to crack. Scale Computing Platform support rendered a herculean, and successful, effort to get this ancient hardware and software virtualized. I can honestly say that, without their assistance I would never have gotten this server virtualized.