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Scale Computing Platform vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Scale Computing Platform
Ranking in HCI
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Edge Computing Platforms (1st)
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Scale Computing Platform is 1.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 14.0%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSAN14.0%
Scale Computing Platform1.9%
Other84.1%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Joel-Gonzalez - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of management with great support and easy setup
It provides a dashboard. You can adjust the signature of the drives to prioritize certain servers over others It gives the ease of management for a small IT department. There could be an easier way to see which servers are on each node. It shows you a small graphical interface, but you have to…
Pramod-Talekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features
While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Scale Computing HC3 is if one of the devices fails, you won't even notice, the service maintains operation. The customers don't have to waste two, or three days on delays. Additionally, you do not have to waste time with recovery software, it is a lot easier."
"The product's initial setup phase is too easy."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It gives the ease of management for a small IT department."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the nice GUI."
"I like that Scale Computing HCR is slimmed down and gives me the features I need and not features that I don't need."
"I rate Scale Computing support 10 out of 10. They're accessible and responsive."
"The solution is scalable."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
 

Cons

"The snapshot technology takes up 500 times more space compared to other solutions."
"I would like bigger clusters with more than eight nodes."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"Scale Computing HC3 said in an announcement they were going to integrate with a backup service which would be good. If they could do this it would be beneficial."
"The product could use a better control center."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"On the fly, you cannot do anything on Scale Computing HC3, though it is a very rarely needed area."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is worth the money, but I would not say it's very cheap or very expensive."
"I give the pricing a nine out of ten."
"rate HC3's pricing a five out of ten since it is affordable."
"I pay for Scale Computing HC3 and it includes customer service for one year. We paid for an additional year for customer service but that includes the updates and everything for the software. Additionally, the licensing is for Windows, which is the same for everybody."
"Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
"The price of the solution package depends on the nodes and other factors. The cost some of our customers paid was $500,000. The licensing cost for the components is very good."
"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
"We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually."
"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Government
7%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise1
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business98
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise128
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Scale Computing HC3?
The product's initial setup phase is too easy.
What needs improvement with Scale Computing HC3?
There could be an easier way to see which servers are on each node. It shows you a small graphical interface, but you have to see them all, and you have to really struggle to figure out which nodes...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
 

Also Known As

Scale Computing HC3
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Resorts World Las Vegas, Stena, Telford Offshore, Goodwill, Sandals, Jerry's Enterprises, Mendard's Royal Farms, Delhaize, Benchmark Electronics, Classic Hotels, Genting Casino, Lindt, Sainsbury's, Landmark Cinemas, Golden Queen Mining, Coca Cola. Holiday Inn, Iron County School District, Sevier County Bank, City of St. Cloud Minnesota, Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, KIB Electronics, Brake Masters, Lincoln County Hospital, Ohio Summit County Board of Elections
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about Scale Computing Platform vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.