We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and IBM FlashSystem based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The tool's most valuable features are scalability and stability."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature we started using, beyond the initial scope for the solution, is the multi-protocol system that allows you to access the same set of files using different network protocols like NFS or SMB. PowerScale’s Unified Permission Model ensures that data security and access permissions are honoured regardless of whether the client is a Windows desktop or a Linux server"
"The solution has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. Rather than managing all the different workloads on different storage arrays, Windows Servers, etc., we just have one place per data centre where we manage all their unstructured data, saving us time."
"The tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."
"The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center."
"The most valuable features are, of course, the virtualization of the storage, the performance, and the compression."
"The speed of the unit is its best feature. It performs very well."
"It's very easy to manage."
"The valuable features are high availability, compression, and a failover mechanism. It's a very highly available storage solution."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"The speed and the ease of installation are the most valuable features."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us and we'd love to have one."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol. At the present, you cannot protect access to data via HTTP or HTTPS the same way that you can secure data access through other protocols like NFS or SMB[...]the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply."
"The biggest weakness is small file handling. Small file compression options are not enabled out of the box. It would be good to have this enabled by default."
"The Data Reduction Pools (DRP) support could be better."
"The basic setup can be challenging when it comes to certain IP addresses and the configuration of the IP. You have to go in to different menus to makes changes and ensure it is stable."
"Product support is restricted to IBM only. It must be decentralized to IBM partners as well."
"The array level RAID does not seem available."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It takes a lot of time to study the product and it's a little complicated in general."
"Events/log analysis tools."
"The GUI for monitoring performance metrics could provide better visibility. For example, it doesn't let me segregate the IOPS per volume."
"The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 39 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) writes "We can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and IBM Scale-out NAS, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Huawei OceanStor. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
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