Scale Computing Platform

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.

Very good for linux and windows guests, also VDI is working hillarious. But I'd rather not use it for Docker or Portainer scenarios

Scale's price point makes it an attractive option for smaller companies.

Well suited: Companies with smaller IT teams and standard Windows/Linux VMs. If you need a solution out of the box that is just working with almost no admin overhead. If you like the idea that you can extend your hypervisor cluster with a new server, 2 cables and 4 commands. If you want to enhance your backup strategy with hourly/daily/weekly real-time snapshots that produce almost no disk or IO cost. If you don't want to care about hardware, drivers, firmware, updates etc. If you want one of the best customer support in industry. Not well suited: Companies with big IT teams with many roles or more exotic needs. If you need granular user rights. When you have very dynamic RAM or CPU needs, that benefit from Hot Add or dynamic memory allocation. When you need to virtualize more exotic OSes. When you have big hypervisor farms where hosts need to go offline for power savings, etc.

In principle, Scale fits into every company, big advantages with distributed locations.

Scale seems like a good fit for us with 15 virtual machines. I can't really say about a larger environment, but the nice thing about HCI is that if you need more CPU, RAM, or storage you just need to add a node. That is really nice as far as I'm concerned.

Hardware and infrastructure very basic administration for an IT guys', all the time they're busy for schedule maintenance. Scale Computing Platform give us a platform where we effectively manage our hardware needs, cloud infrastructure and best part is a fully integrated platform that runs our business apps, visualization computing platform that's easy to deploy and easy to manage.

My company has deployed Scale for small to med sized work loads. It is perfect for the SMB market running 30 or less VM's with site to site replication. The management interface is super simple, and flexible. It is also more cost effective to deploy than some single host solutions. I would be hesitant to deploy Scale in a high compliance environment because it can not native support KMS for drive encryption. This is one of the only issues I have seen so far.

Ease of use and, installation and deployment

Scale Computing Platform proves to be excellent in environments that require a hyper-converged infrastructure with daily functionalities, and for organizations with remote locations that want to implement on-premises resources without the need to set up a data center. The HC3 software has all the functionalities for the operation and management of its resources, with easy-to-follow and operate workflows, and it has a low learning curve.

When we have a customer in the Philippines that is looking for a hyperconverge solution to their existing network setup. The customer has traditional topology/network that uses vms. Hence, Scale Computing Platform fits the requirements that is needed by the customer. The features and specifications were address properly and the sizing of the nodes were perfectly addressed.

Scale has worked perfectly for all of our clients with no issues to date.

If you have an outdated environment and want to upgrade, choose the Scale Computing platform, it delivers the best in the cutting-edge technology market. The simplicity of the SC// Platform directly impacts IT with greater productivity and lower costs. Simply mix and match old and new hardware and applications on the same infrastructure for a future-proof environment that can be scaled up or down as needed. Combining centralized management with on-premises and cloud automation enables infrastructure and applications to achieve and maintain the desired state throughout the life of the environment.

It is easy for small or large environments, we have an IT and OT split and they can work in both arenas easily. They build their product with high availability in mind so even small setups are able to have a backup if something happens. Can't think of a scenario they can't fit into.

Onboarding with Scale was such a breeze. I worried about how difficult it would be to migrate my servers from Hyper-V over to Scale, it was the easiest migration I've ever had.

If you're using some of the latest Windows OS's, you'll be fine. If you're looking to upgrade those while in the process of migrating - consider building a new image and migrating the data/services manually. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to upgrade an VM's OS. Scale Computing Platform does well with almost all Operating Systems. We haven't run into any hardware or software incompatibilities moving from Vmware. We wanted to do VDI for a lot less money but the jury is out on whether Scale Computing Platform + GPU cards are going to be enough for things like Adobe Creative cloud in a lab of 30 terminals.

Very simple to implement in our case. I believe they can provide a solution that fits any environment looking for a simple way to virtualize and provide failover for server nodes and virtual machines.

The Scale Platform is perfectly suited to run multiple Windows and Linux servers and run them at peak performance. The Scale Platform is also really excellent at data recovery with the intuitive way to mount a snapshot's drive and retrieve any potentially missing data.

The single scenario where we have found Scale to not be great at was when we needed to migrate some existing Cisco-based servers and were unable to do so since they were not supported on a Scale platform.

Scale Computing seems to be a good solution for small to medium size organizations. I can't speak to large organizations and how well it supports scaling with their resources. For our case, we considered VMWare, HyperV, Scale, and others. We were initially going to choose Hyper-V; however, with the rumors of it being discontinued, we with Scale due to its price and ease of management.

Scale is a perfect solution for schools looking to switch over from a clunkier system such as VMware. They simplify how virtual computing is handled and, over the year, has been nothing but stable. We are able to roll out the newest updates and patches over three nodes with zero downtime and offer a backup node that is easy to set up and use, and make restoring VMs on the fly a walk in the park.

Anywhere that requires highly available, highly scalable setups. As optics on the client are required prior to quoting, it's difficult to undersell, which is a huge bonus.

I believe that they function well in what they do.

This platform is great for small to medium size businesses that require an on-premises presence for their needs. It's incredibly easy to spin up and manage your resources from a single pane. Host upgrades are seamless as well! The lack of visibility into stats, API availability, and GUI console options hurts, but we didn't find it to be a deal breaker in our experience. We've been using our converged solutions for a year now, and we're content with it.

For some places with smaller IT staffs, it can help a ton to support and simplify the jobs that need to be done. While it is very helpful and simple for us, much smaller businesses may find it easier to just get a single machine and run an instance of Windows Server on it.

While migrating from our Hyper-V solutions, we ran into some errors while using the Carbonite Migrate software on the target machine, and it kept BSOD each time it was power cycled or rebooted, and support sat on the phone for hours on end with me until the issue was resolved and this was at 11:00 pm EST on the weekend.