TrustRadius Insights for Scale Computing Platform are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Ease of Updates: Users have appreciated the simplicity of performing updates on the Scale Computing Platform, noting that it only requires a single button to push, allowing for efficient streamlining. This has saved users valuable time and effort and has helped them to stay current with software enhancements seamlessly.
Efficient Deployment: Reviewers have highlighted the easy and fast deployment of new servers on the platform, i.e. requiring zero additional space or power making the setup hassle-free. The efficiency in deployment has been crucial for users looking to expand their infrastructure rapidly without complications or delays.
Robust Backup Solutions: Users value the robust backup solutions available on the Scale Computing Platform, mentioning the ease of creating multiple scheduled backups for machines and the speed at which fresh installations can be brought up. This reliability has instilled confidence in users regarding data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.
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Scale Computing Platform Reviews
18 Reviews
Enterprises (1,001+ employees)
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As the Automation Professional for a large pasta manufacturer, I use the SCALE computing platform to host all of the plant's automation servers. As a 24/7-363 operation, these systems are critical for our day-to-day operations. We have been using the SCALE computing system for five years and have found it to be reliable, easy to operate, and manageable. In the rare case when I've had to call for technical support, the service has been prompt and professional. I would highly recommend SCALE Computing and their products!
We use the Scale HC3 Hypervisor as primary hypervisor for Windows and Linux servers as well as virtual appliances. We also use it as extension to our backup strategy, which allows us to create as many application consistent snapshots as we like, to go back in time whenever needed.
Pros
Customer support and service is outstanding.
Updates and upgrades are hassle-free with no downtime.
No need to worry about hardware, BIOS, drivers, firmware.
Outstanding handling of snapshots with thousands of snapshots possible with almost no disk cost and no IO costs. We snapshot each VM every hour and keep snapshots for 48 hours and 2 weeks.
REST API can be used to create your own reports and scripts.
The Hypervisor just runs. No downtimes since it was integrated 2 years ago.
Replication to another cluster is very easy
Cons
It exposes no backup API. You have to treat VMs as physical machines, with all the drawbacks. This is a huge problem, since the official partner Acronis can't deliver. If you ever worked with Veeam you want it back very very badly.
Assigned RAM is used RAM. The hypervisor can't share memory or only allocate what is used etc. It's wasted RAM most of the time.
No logging and auditing. (There is, but not visible to the customer).
The GUI is quite bad. It looks like done by a designer instead of an IT expert. But it's improving constantly.
The company relies heavily on KVM, but seems to have no developer in the open source community. This leads to answers like "we can't do anything about QEMU drivers". Yes, you can. Have delevopers working on it.
You can't do basic things like list all of your VMs and see how much RAM/disk, etc. they are using (e.g. in a list view).
No rules on which VMs start on which nodes, which VMs to prioritize, etc.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
We utilize the Scale Computing Platform as our primary on-premises virtual environment. We made the decision to migrate from VMWare due to aging hardware. The decision was mainly predicated on the cost and benefits that Scale's product provides for us compared to the competitors in the space.
Pros
No hassle and simple UI.
Ease of use managing resources.
Great support.
Cons
Lack of management and APIs for remote management.
Lack of backup integration with major players. You have to try each virtual server as physical.
Lack of detail in resource utilization.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Scale Computing has various benefits based on the use case. For HC3 it provides for storage, compute and vitualization into a single solution. This allows for simplicity, reduced foot print in the data center, reduced maintenance costs, HVAC, etc. It is a flexible platform right out of the box with minimal setup and configuration time.
Pros
Eliminates the need for separate storage, compute and networking.
Simplistic
Fully integrated right out of the box.
Cons
I do not see anything from a negative standpoint at this time, comprehensive product.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for small to medium environments, where they may have a limited IT staff. The core data center administrators are challenged to maintain 24/7 uptime and to protect the critical data that resides in the databases and file services that make up the data center that may be spread across dozens or hundreds of workloads. The infrastructure to run all of these workloads and store their data can become complex as it grows and administrators may be challenged to manage multiple server, storage, and virtualization technologies to form the infrastructure. There are a vast number of benefits of moving to a solution combining the best of both worlds.
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
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).
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.
Scale devices will replace our internal VMWARE/SAN/HPE environment at corporate and our DR site. Additionally, we will be using it to power 25 (50%) of our bigger retail stores. If this is successful and we see enough ROI we will implement a smaller version of the solution Scale is working on in the rest of the 25 retail stores. I expect this will increase up-time to almost 100% and allow upgrades and changes without issue. Additionally, these units will assist during power events as they have great redundancy.
Pros
Redundancy
Simple interface
24/7/365 support (onshore)
Relatively inexpensive compared to VMware/SAN solutions.
Cons
Needs a much more robust multi-site management suite
Hardware choices need to be expanded. I know they are working on this actively.
More detailed backup instructions. The interface is too simple.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's well suited for big video/security installations that need redundancy and any kind of redundant situation. If IT resources are scarce or lacking (like can't afford a VMware Jockey) buy Scale instead. If you need less storage and smaller edge redundancy, Scale is not there yet but they are within this year of having it happen.
We use a Scale cluster for our internal data center. We use it for mainly corporate headquarters and have been pleased with its performance. We replaced a retiring Vmware data center setup.
Pros
Support is great
Easy to add a node
Snapshotting is simple
Cons
Recovering a VM from a snapshot is cumbersome.
Likelihood to Recommend
Scale is good for a small to medium company's data center. Easy to deploy and maintain. If you want to keep your servers and storage separate, this would not be the best solution.
We use our scale systems for virtual machine hosting. It allows redundancy, failover, and DR in a simple, speedy way that we did not get from our Citrix or Windows-based virtual environments.
Pros
Speed of new machine deployment: using prebuilt stored clones we can deploy servers virtually within seconds and have them doing their jobs.
Redundancy: our DR is simplified and allowed above the 99.9999% uptime we all strive for.
Support: immediate support, remotely built into the OS with a very fast turnaround for any problems.
Cons
The GUI is very limited in its end-user scope, many times we have had minor problems that we could have fixed ourselves but needed Scale to access the system remotely to fix or advise.
Parts needed to come quickly, but the company is U.S. based mostly. Having more parts in UK would mean an even faster turn around.
When there have been more advanced problems, the GUI and reporting is quite limited. More info could be given to the end user if there was the ability to do so.
Likelihood to Recommend
Where you require a quick creation of a virtual machine either live for scaling production or demand. Keeping clones ready to go make it very quick. It can get expensive with more nodes, but the more nodes the better the DR.
The primary use case for the Scale Computing HC3 platform was for delivery of VDIs for a specific organisational design activity across two disparate companies. There was little integration at that point and the 2 large organisations had legacy environments that it was/still is hard to integrate (because of scale/cost).
The business team re-organisations were large scale and had been under NDA so minimal preparation could be undertaken. The project had already set a budget in advance.
Therefore we needed a quick to deliver, cost effective way of providing the environments, with DR, within each organisation, for use by employees from the other organisation.
To this end we deployed 16 x Lenovo based Scale HC3 appliances, 4 to each of 4 data centres with each pair of data centres belonging to the individual companies. In this way, we hit the timescales, hit the budget and provided a robust solution hosting, in total, circa 1200 VDIs complete with a replicated DR instance
Pros
As an appliance, it comes ready built and with all licenses included. No VMWare, no vCentre, no fiddly build steps
On site resilience is built in to the cluster - and it works; as does cross site replication for BCP/DR
Remote support and the pre tested upgrade facility are good and work - our outsourcers hate it as it doesn't need much outside a service desk call to have some Scale
Cons
Cross site VM migration is a feature on the roadmap we are looking forward to
When dealing with hundreds of VMs all needing the same change e.g. replication settings, being able to select those as a group or set would have been a good timesaver
Accessibility to external monitoring could be simpler - it takes a support call to turn it on. Whilst it is understandable that end users are kept away from the configs that make it work, some elements such as simple SNMP names and trap settings could be menu driven.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cross site VDI or other windows/Linux server deployments
Scale H3 is being used as the virtualization solution for one of our companies that, due to technical requirements, is needing a local data center in addition to the global one. As Scale H3 is one of the easiest and lower-cost hyper-convergence systems on the market, it fits perfectly to our purposes.
Pros
Easy to use.
Low-cost hyper-convergence solution.
Scalability.
Quick installation and start-up.
Cons
Inflexible backup.
Not integrable with Veeam Backup.
Poor management tools.
Not a reliable performance with large systems.
Likelihood to Recommend
Scale HC3 is suited for a small datacenter not requiring large systems with high performance, because of its low-cost price and its ease of use. On the other hand, if you're looking for an optimum system for a high-performance environment, you should go to a more reliable hyper-convergence or traditional virtualization system.
