StorMagic SvSAN Vs. Scale Computing HC3

This comparison was written by By Jerome M. Wendt, president and founder, DCIG, LLC, on a paper published on February 20, 2020.

A Comparison How StorMagic SvSAN and Scale Computing HC3  Deliver
on Enterprise Edge Requirements

Retail outlets. Remote offices. Oil rigs. Small and remote locations like these represent the new sources of data that will drive current and future business decisions. They also characterize the types of locations into which enterprises will deploy solutions that will gather, protect and process the data generated there.

Cost-effective Flexibility at the Edge
Organizations may require the solution provide them flexibility in configuring it for each of their edge sites. For instance, each smaller site may differ in the amount of network bandwidth available to it.
Each site’s physical environment may fluctuate in its available heating, cooling, physical space, and power to support the solution. Each site’s budget may vary. The solution should ideally take all these variables into account in its design to facilitate deployment into these environments.

StorMagic and Scale Computing
They represent two providers that each respectively offer solutions designed to meet the requirements of these smaller environments. Both offer solutions that provide high levels of availability, performance, scalability, and support. They also each offer their solutions at price points attractive for deployment in these environments.

The differences between these 2 solutions emerge in the flexibility they each give organizations to configure and manage them.

Ways in which they differ include:
Server-based Hardware Configurations
Scale Computing delivers each of its server-based solutions as a bundled hardware and software appliance. It currently offers its HE500, HC1000, and HC5000 appliance lines as part of its HC3 Series. Organizations may then choose the model that best matches the requirements of data center environments or the edge.

The StorMagic SvSAN solution resembles the Scale Computing HC3 series in that an organization may acquire an all-in-one, preconfigured SvSAN appliance. However, StorMagic makes its SvSAN available as a software-only solution. Using this approach, organizations may deploy SvSAN on server hardware they already own or can obtain independently.

Software Configurations
Scale currently only makes its software available on its all-in-one HC3 appliances. Each HC3 appliance ships with its storage and hypervisor software. Scale’s hypervisor software consists of its own implementation of the Linux Kernel-based VM (KVM) hypervisor. StorMagic makes its SvSAN storage software as a software-only purchase that one may deploy on any server hardware. Atop its SvSAN HCI software, an organization may run one of three hypervisors: Hyper-V, vSphere, and Linux Open KVM.

Highly Available Configurations
The two companies share one tactic in common to help smaller sites overcome these limitations and deliver HA. Both solutions give organizations the option to deploy three servers at a small site to create a HA cluster configuration. Using this configuration, should one server fail, the other two take over processing.

StorMagic does offer organizations a second option to deliver HA in their small sites. Rather than using a third server, it offers a Witness Host to provide HA.

In this configuration, if communication between the two clustered servers fail, each server checks in with the Witness Host. The Witness Host then elects one of the remaining servers to assume all processing and puts the other server in stand-by mode. The stand-by server only rejoins the cluster and resumes processing once it re-establishes communication with the other server.

Management
Scale Computing provides multiple options to facilitate management of its HC3 solution across multiple small sites. One may manage an HC3 cluster through a web-based GUI that one may access from any node in an HC3 cluster.

The Scale web-based GUI may manage a single HC3 site or dozens of them. An organization may manage the compute, storage, and VMs on each cluster as well as monitor each cluster’s resource utilization.
The management of a StorMagic SvSAN environment will largely take on the profile of the hypervisor that the organization uses. Since SvSAN supports Linux KVM, Hyper-V, and vSphere hypervisors, organizations would use the management platforms associated with them.

And the Best Choice is …
The StorMagic SvSAN and the Scale Computing HC3 solutions represent two of the best, if not the best, examples of HCI solutions optimized for remote and small offices.

They both:
• Deliver their respective solutions at economical price points
• Make deployments simple and easy to achieve
• Take steps to minimize hardware requirements

The right choice between the them will often come down to 4 factors. Each organization must determine how well each solution’s flexibility in cost, HA, management, and scaling features align with their specific needs.