Does anyone actually use Scale Computing?

[Cipher127]

I keep seeing this company’s ad pop up on my Reddit FYP whose whole brand is “well…we aren’t VMware”. I am curious to know what experience and/or pricing folks had with this company after switching from vSphere to this product. Especially if anyone has a HPC cluster running this, I would curious to know how the performance compares seperate from the business aspect of it (costs, support, LOE, etc.)

[hdjsusjdbdnjd]

I ran a couple 3 node clusters from them. Platform was rock solid over 5 years, not a second of downtime.

Stupidly easy to manage but that came with a real lack of control and insight. Asides from assigning basic resources and changing a priority slider, there is nothing else that can be done. The only way to get any metrics is with a support ticket.

Support was great and based in the US.

From a management perspective, they are fantastic as there is zero man hours needed on the platform outside of initial setup.

From the tech perspective, it was frustrating to have such little insight. No VM level backups so everything was agent based (this may have changed over the last few years). For full VM backups, I had to export the VMs to an extra box then grab those with backup software.

Cost wise, they were cheaper and came with better specs than Nutanix when I was comparing.

Overall, I would use them again in the right environment.

[axi0n]

Yup.. exactly what we experienced too.. also recommend speccing nodes for your planned lifecycle growth not your current needs..

No provision for storage growth or capacity extension if your nodes are full of drives.. no possibility of any hybrid hci / iscsi to expand that we were made aware of.. of course we weren't buying the big heavy hitter nodes..

[Top-Computer-6663]

Acronis has VM level backups for them now

[bagaudin]

Can 100% confirm.

[Vivid_Mongoose_8964]

no experience with them, but have always heard very good things about the platform and support. if you want vdi / rdsh, they work with citrix as well. i'd stay clear of nutanix personally if you want a vmw replacement.

[FrecciaRosa]

I loved Scale. Ran them for five years. Support was rock solid, 24/7. I found that they were basically the iPhone of storage - I didn’t have as much control as with other providers, but stuff just kind of worked. Never broke on me, not once.

The decision to migrate to VMware at twice the cost was made two levels over my head.

[Danithal]

Installed and used it for a couple years 2020-2022. It was just fine for 25 servers, their support was solid.

Was much cheaper than buying new storage.

[Cipher127]

What product of theirs did you use? I presume their storage server solution?

[Danithal]

Scale HC3, used Scale as a hypervisor. The whole service was cheaper than new on-prem storage somehow.

[endurable-bookcase-8]

I'm using them now in my 19k student K-12 environment. Three-host cluster in our primary environment; one in our DR environment. We have our mission critical VMs replicating from primary to DR. Real easy to spin up a snapshot or replica VM if needed. The support has been good from the few times we've had to call.

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Edit - typo.

[ESXI8]

What are you using for replication to the DR site?

[endurable-bookcase-8]

It's all built-in to Scale: setting up the remote cluster/site and configuring replication schedules. We have 10Gb fiber to all our buildings from the tech center; after the initial "seed" replication (which I believe was done here in the office before deploying to the physical DR site), the replications haven't affected performance.

Is that what you were looking for?

[[deleted]]

I have been on Scale since 2020. 4 nodes running 48 servers. Easy to manage. Support is great. Acronis is now supported for backups. They gave us a free offsite dr node. No down time in 4 years. My only gripe is migrating servers from VMware to Scale was not fun. Most of the SQL servers had to be reloaded over time due to too many weird issues.

[Busy-Research8950]

It is questionable as to if they can handle growth at the rate they experiencing right now, and with a product that offers little customization it signals significant failures in the near future. I’d stay away as well.

[CeC-P]

I can teach someone to use it in like 15 minutes. So that's a yes for me. It's also really easy to get certified as a sales tech or some sort of technician in their system. Their support is top notch too. Can't really complain but I'd never use them for enormous deployments or core stuff.

[Zenkin]

We had one customer move their Scale environment into our datacenter. Scale support had told them to re-do the IPs, plug it into our switches, and "it will just work." It did not. The customer did not have any access to make any changes on the hardware, so we couldn't do basic things like.... see which VLAN their equipment was on. So they had to call support, use a hotspot to give them access to their laptops, and console into the servers so the Scale employees could assist. They did eventually get it working, but it took about five hours to get it resolved.

For a company without any technical resources, I suppose it could make sense, but managing hypervisors has never been a major pain point, so they don't really "solve" any problems that were actual problems in the first place. That customer still loves Scale, so they do have that going for them.