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Celerra [EOL] vs Dell PowerScale comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Celerra [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dell PowerScale
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user5157 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr System Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Highly scalable and reliable SAN with fiber channel connectivity but bulky in size and consumes a lot of power
Hot spare disk system to take over the full workload in the event of a failure, at the same performance and service levels. The data is clustered over multiple disks so data read/write access time is very low. Fiber channel connectivity option for high speed data transfer. Single point of management/control. Customized version of Linux OS hence much higher security.
SK
Solutions Architect at a university with 10,001+ employees
Operates seamlessly and minimizes downtime while meeting enterprise file share demands
The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed. These features benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead. While I have not calculated an exact number regarding the reduction in downtime, we have always been using the product, so we have no baseline to compare it to. However, it is a very good product. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) scales very well with the growing needs of my company.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"At last we bought this Celerra NS 40, with 17 TB of space which is giving superb performance."
"The solution allows me to use SSMDS to store data for end users and share it within different locations."
"I appreciate the high-availability data storage feature of Dell PowerScale the most, as it has benefited my organization by improving storage and collapsing technologies, making it easier for the users and aligning with our digital transformation initiatives by collapsing a large environment to a small footprint."
"The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and ease of implementation."
"Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and it is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced."
"What I appreciate about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are its best features: it supports both file and object storage, and it is very easy to manage."
"I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as a product a ten out of ten."
"The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon, making it easier and more cost-effective with just one point of contact."
"The product's scalability feature is super easy to use."
 

Cons

"Very bulky and heavy in weight."
"I would appreciate seeing improvements in Dell PowerScale, particularly because it has been weak with small file writes."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could be improved, particularly the UI, which could use some polishing as far as ease of use for the customer."
"It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) certainly has room for improvement; since it does not provide SAN at the moment, I would look for Dell to create a complete unified solution just like NetApp."
"Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"From the disadvantages perspective, if I need to replace a drive, I must shut down that node."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is excellent."
"Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time."
"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."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."
"This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise51
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve some functions such as Apache S3 or containerized storage support, as these aspects are not well-developed. Their support system is weak; many issues ...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Our primary use cases include virtualization storage and external storage via NFS.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Celerra
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, Kindred Healthcare, Cosentry, Sumitomo Life Insurance Company, Shriners, BZWBK
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: May 2026.
896,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.