Cisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017). Cisco's modern HCI solution is Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix.
N/A
Scale Computing Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HyperCore software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. The vendor says that, using patented HyperCore™ technology, the SC//HyperCore self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and…
$249
per year per core
Pricing
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Scale Computing Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$249
per year per core
Professional
$312
per year per core
Professional Essentials
$5,600
one-time fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
Scale Computing Platform
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Pricing shown in U.S. Dollar.
Pricing for other regions available on request.
Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
Scale is best suited to environments that do not have excessive external or proprietary peripherals. Integrating with tape drive backups or robot tape libraries can be problematic. The most effective use of Scale systems is for companies running multiple instances of the same operating system. The hypervisor's code/file-sharing nature does an excellent job managing new instances while keeping the increase in storage to a minimum.
Too much integration with Cisco UCS fabric interconnects is required, which makes the product most useful for customers who already have Cisco UCS. Options without fabric interconnects are limited.
Hyper-V integration is way behind (but to be fair I think that's true for most vendors in this space).
Display the IP address of the node on which the VM is running on the Devices (gear icon) tab. This would allow me to manage my Microsoft license easier.
During the on-boarding I missed the step to install the Scale Computing Platform tools, and we didn't notice this until I had issues with backups. It would be helpful if some kind of alert notification would display on a VM card if the tools were not installed.
Add a new health or diagnostics tab that would display alerts, diagnostic tools, performance concerns or pattern anomalies.
Some kind of email/alert when a disk reaches near capacity
I'm on the fence about renewing the support contract. The reliability of the HC3 makes it difficult to spend the cost of the renewal which is higher than the costs prior to Scale. I'm convinced if we were a larger district that the savings would be tremendous and I wouldn't hesitate to renew. In our specific situation, it may be more feasible to pay per incident.
Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.
I never contacted Cisco support for any problem. I cannot skip this question. It provides good hardware for my organization to using this product. All the updates will be made promptly. Anything happen we just need to open a ticket to the helpdesk team. We can get new info from a team in Malaysia.
We had one need for support post-setup, and the person who answered the phone was the support person I needed. No transfer, no level one, and our accents were similar enough that we understood each other easily. The problem was actually in my switch, not with Scale, but the support person still assisted me and got the entire cluster up and running again in under 30 minutes. They are truly a partner not just a vendor.
The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.
VMware vSAN is more elastic and easy to sell as you can have more flexibility with the hardware and can use or just upgrade hardware already deployment in the client infrastructure and additionally its have no dependencies about the DNS/NTP, what is important..
As mentioned previously, not having to worry about the compatibility between your hardware, hypervisor, and VM OS is a great help. On the downside, there is less ability to get deep in the weeds with your own system. Much of the Scale HyperCore OS is locked down intentionally, which prevents technical users from having much insight on broad error messages without support intervention.
HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.
HX made positive impact on our overall business objective and helped in reducing operational and capital expenditures almost by 60%
We used to have huge footprint of FC SAN storage and highly skilled SME's to manage the FC SAN environments. HX helped in getting rid of costly SAN investments and we could move the skilled SMEs on higher work stack. With HX, we are able to effectively manage day to day operations with less skilled resources.
We also benefitted largely from the single OEM support (Cisco end to end for HX, network fabric and hypervisor). In earlier case, we used to log service requests to SAN vendor, Hypervisor vendor and network fabric vendor separately. In case of inter-related issues between the vendors, our business used to suffer. These all challenges are removed by HX adoption. This is helping us support the business with maximum uptime ever. Our service SLA's are also improved by 70%
