Buurst SoftNAS vs Dell PowerScale comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Buurst and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the NAS category. Buurst is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.0, while Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. Buurst holds a 1.6% mindshare in N, compared to Dell Technologies’s 13.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Buurst users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Buurst SoftNAS

Read 1 Buurst SoftNAS review

779 Views
779 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerScale

Read 107 Dell PowerScale reviews

17,998 Views
9,899 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Buurst SoftNAS

Dell PowerScale

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Buurst SoftNAS and Dell PowerScale based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, CTERA and others in NAS.

To learn more, read our detailed NAS Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

NAS

September 2026

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Helped 914,351 peers since 2012

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

Buurst SoftNAS

Ranking in NAS

17th

Average Rating

7.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dell PowerScale

Ranking in NAS

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

107

Ranking in other categories

File and Object Storage (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Buurst SoftNAS is 1.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 13.3%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale	13.3%
Buurst SoftNAS	1.6%
Other	85.1%

NAS

Featured Reviews

SwapnilDaga

Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Shared file access has improved collaboration but documentation and support still need work

Buurst SoftNAS can be improved regarding enterprise features, as those are not yet matured enough for enterprises. It covers most of the NAS requirements, but some of the advanced features available in premium storage platforms could be more mature. Organizations like ours, which are highly specialized for storage requirements, need additional validation before large-scale deployments. Regarding the needed improvements, I think the documentation and troubleshooting guides are not up to standard and could be improved. The best practices, architectures, and advanced configuration examples should be included in those documentations. Customer support for Buurst SoftNAS can be improved, as I have not seen major support.

Read full review

RahulSharma8

Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group

Unified file sharing has simplified multi-tenant access and has delivered seamless data replication

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory. The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Buurst SoftNAS has impacted my organization positively through cost efficiency compared to other NAS platforms, offering a compelling value proposition."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together."

"The solution allows me to use SSMDS to store data for end users and share it within different locations."

"With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it uses not just a terabyte but petabytes of data, storing a large amount of data takes within minutes, and you can bring it down to seconds as well, as it does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time."

"The technical support has been excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten for support."

"PowerScale is one of those things that will grow in your environment; once you start it with one thing, you'll learn that it can do much more, very quickly."

"Overall, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has made the management of the data and networks easier."

"Dell PowerScale helps us in terms of providing desired performance that meets the expectations of our end customers."

"Overall, the hardware itself, and the OneFS file system, are the best selling points, combined with the delivery and the installation."

More Dell PowerScale pros

Cons

"Buurst SoftNAS can be improved regarding enterprise features, as those are not yet matured enough for enterprises."

"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive."

"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."

"Dell PowerScale is strong overall, but a few areas such as OneFS, QA, and reporting could be more intuitive, especially when analyzing detailed performance and capacity information."

"The analytics could be improved."

"The management and monitoring tools comprise a disparate suite of products and the roadmap is very unclear. We've got four different products that look after the Isilon, management-wise, and it's a bit of a mess."

"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."

"Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash."

"The portal is really complicated to figure out features and functions, and it could be easier to navigate."

More Dell PowerScale cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."

"The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."

"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."

"The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."

"Dealing with the product costs and licensing areas is getting easier since Dell is simplifying the licensing process and licensing packages offered to users."

More Dell PowerScale pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	65

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Buurst SoftNAS?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Buurst SoftNAS was that the pricing was initially high. After discussions with the team of Buurst SoftNAS, I was able to negotiate, and as ...

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What needs improvement with Buurst SoftNAS?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Buurst SoftNAS?

I have been using Buurst SoftNAS for two years. File workloads are my main use case for Buurst SoftNAS, and the SMB environments are where we primarily use Buurst SoftNAS. We provide our users with...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level of comparison. Although in the current markets we have seen the price differenc...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

There should be some enhancement where Dell PowerScale can have block level functionality or block storage kind of functionality. Although there is a different product line from Dell, if there is s...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

We use Dell PowerScale for our object scale and different kinds of storage, including both object storage and file storage.I am part of the solution architect team, which is a techno-commercial rol...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Buurst SoftNAS

Compared 19% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Buurst SoftNAS

Compared 4% of the time

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NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 16% of the time

Everpure FlashBlade vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 7% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 5% of the time

VAST Data vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 3% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 3% of the time

More Dell PowerScale Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NAS

September 2026

Download Buurst SoftNAS product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale

September 2026

Download Dell PowerScale product report

Also Known As

SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

Overview

Buurst SoftNAS offers scalable cloud storage solutions designed to meet demanding data management requirements. Ideal for businesses seeking to optimize their cloud infrastructure, Buurst SoftNAS provides flexible deployment options and ensures data protection and high availability.

Designed for enterprise use, Buurst SoftNAS supports seamless migration to the cloud while maintaining secure and reliable access to critical data. Offering comprehensive file storage support, it empowers businesses to increase efficiency and manage data more effectively. With its adaptability and robust features, SoftNAS delivers an optimized solution tailored to meet business-specific demands in the cloud environment.

What are the key features of Buurst SoftNAS?

Performance: Optimizes storage performance with fine-tuned settings.
Security: Ensures data protection through encryption and access control.
Scalability: Easily scales storage capacity to meet growing data needs.
High Availability: Offers continuous access to data with failover protection.
Cross-Platform Support: Integrates with different OS environments seamlessly.

What are the ROI benefits when evaluating Buurst SoftNAS?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces storage costs with optimized cloud usage.
Business Continuity: Minimizes downtime with robust data protection.
Enhanced Productivity: Boosts operational efficiency by simplifying access to data.
Future-Proofing: Keeps businesses agile in adapting to new storage demands.

Buurst SoftNAS can be implemented in industries such as healthcare, finance, and media, where data integrity and security are paramount. In these sectors, it enhances data management strategies by providing scalable and secure cloud storage, allowing organizations to meet industry-specific regulatory requirements and improve data workflow efficiency.

Buurst

As a storage engine in Dell AI Data Platform, Dell PowerScale is the world's #1 scale-out NAS platform for enterprise unstructured data. Trusted by more than 25,000 customers, including more than 1,500 customers running GPU workloads, PowerScale uses OneFS operating system to provide a single namespace and unified file and object access for AI/ML training, RAG pipelines, analytics, media production, and life sciences, and other demanding workloads. PowerScale F710 was the world’s first Ethernet-based storage appliance certified with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Selected configurations support NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, pNFS, and NFS over RDMA for high-throughput parallel AI data access. PowerScale supports near-linear, non-disruptive scaling from terabytes to petabytes. Available in all-flash, hybrid, and archive configurations for on-premises and cloud deployment options, including AWS and Azure. Supported next-generation configurations deliver up to 35 GB/s read throughput per node.

Dell PowerScale Isilon provides a comprehensive platform for unstructured data, excelling in scalability, management, and performance. With features like single-pane management, SyncIQ, and SmartQuotas, it handles large datasets with flexibility and robust security. Its multi-protocol support and seamless expansion improve operational efficiency. While it offers strong data protection, enhancements in cloud integration, cybersecurity, and performance are sought. Users note potential for cost reductions and streamlined configurations and mention desired improvements in object storage handling and NFS support.

What are the key features of Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Single-pane management: Simplifies data control and monitoring through a unified interface.
SyncIQ: Ensures efficient data replication for business continuity.
SmartQuotas: Provides intelligent quota management for optimized storage allocation.
Multi-protocol support: Facilitates cross-platform data access and integration.
Seamless storage expansion: Allows effortless scaling to accommodate growing data needs.

What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Operational efficiency: Reduces workload with easy management and automation.
Enhanced security: Offers comprehensive data protection and recovery options.
Scalability: Supports large-scale data storage with flexible growth capabilities.
Performance: Delivers high-speed data processing for demanding applications.
Integration flexibility: Adapts to on-prem and hybrid cloud environments for diverse deployment needs.

Organizations across industries utilize Dell PowerScale Isilon for large-scale unstructured storage, supporting applications like video archiving, genomic data storage, and high-resolution imaging. Educational institutions, research centers, and media enterprises rely on its scaled-out storage capabilities, providing centralized, secure storage for diverse applications in hybrid, cloud, and on-prem environments.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Netflix, Boeing, Nike, Coca Cola, Hearst, Ndemand, Carbon Media Group, Atypon, The Street, MagHub, CenturyLink, InfoSys

OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, CTERA and others in NAS. Updated: September 2026.

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