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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs HPE GreenLake for File Storage comparison

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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade reduces total cost of ownership by enhancing efficiency, enabling fast restorations, and supporting diverse use cases.
Sentiment score
7.1
Dell PowerScale enhances management efficiency and scalability, improving storage performance, reducing costs, and delivering strong ROI and peace of mind.
Sentiment score
5.9
HPE GreenLake improved returns with better control, scalability, efficiency, cost savings, and stability, supporting expansion without increasing team sizes.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.
In terms of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) specifically, we have seen a return on investment due to faster performance than our last few storage arrays, and the general usability is a lot better.
The second cluster of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) gives us flexibility for small things like code upgrades, all the way to scenarios where we have lost this data center or data, allowing us to check if data is still intact on the other side.
Since they operate 24 by seven, the necessary tasks are completed continuously, which is quicker than if my team handled them only between nine to five.
We had HPE hardware on Hyper-V previously, and HPE GreenLake gave us dHCI with VMware and a lot more stability.
I have seen a return on investment with HPE GreenLake for File Storage.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade's support is generally praised for responsiveness, despite occasional delays and communication issues, maintaining a favorable reputation.
Sentiment score
8.2
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) support is praised for expertise but criticized for first-line issues and occasional communication barriers.
Sentiment score
7.3
HPE GreenLake for File Storage support is praised for quick, expert solutions, with some desiring more language options.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
Dell provides support within four hours, and they always fulfill their promises.
They have managed previous issues well.
The reason for this rating is that there is no downtime.
On a scale from one being the worst and ten being the best, I rate my customer service and technical support for the HPE GreenLake for File Storage as a ten.
The support with GreenLake is good because we always have an engineer who helps the customer.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Pure Storage FlashBlade excels in scalability, with seamless expansion, downtime-free growth, and praised support across various sectors.
Sentiment score
7.4
Dell PowerScale offers scalable, flexible storage for growing enterprises, supporting seamless capacity expansion and stable performance with automatic tiering.
Sentiment score
6.8
HPE GreenLake for File Storage offers scalable, flexible solutions for diverse enterprises, balancing performance, capacity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
We started on PowerScale with around about 300 terabytes and are now two and a half petabytes, still on the same file system.
That's really saved us in certain areas as we didn't have funding to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) until next year, which is why we utilized the cloud pools functionality to offload.
Dell PowerScale is highly scalable, as evidenced by the reduced physical hardware and the efficient use of rack space.
It's suitable for startup growth as well as large enterprises, and the modular, disaggregated nature provides the flexibility needed for efficient application scaling.
Currently, we don't use any sort of scaling ability, but being able to buy what you need when you need it and only having to pay as you grow is a game changer for our operational costs; it's a money saver.
You can connect around 2 million storage servers to the same architecture, so scaling is not a problem.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Pure Storage FlashBlade offers exceptional reliability and impressive stability, featuring 99.999% uptime, seamless upgrades, and high performance.
Sentiment score
8.1
Dell PowerScale is reliable and easy to manage, with high availability despite occasional support and load balancing issues.
Sentiment score
5.6
HPE GreenLake for File Storage is highly stable and reliable, with minimal downtime and efficient performance in diverse environments.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect.
I find the product to be resilient and stable. There's no downtime and no crashes.
The file system is very stable and it rarely goes down.
Having had zero catastrophic outages.
Since we've been on HPE GreenLake for File Storage, I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Users recommend better pricing, cloud integration, support, documentation, and analytics for Pure Storage FlashBlade, improving efficiency and compatibility.
Dell PowerScale is costly and lacks cloud integration, with usability, support, and management improvements needed for better user experience.
HPE GreenLake for File Storage needs improved multi-cloud features, connectivity, integration, cost-effectiveness, and enhanced customer support.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
Hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline.
I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).
If I could improve one thing on Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it would be better object storage as it recently breached into S3, and that capability could be broadened.
HP has already deployed AI in GreenLake's cloud features, but they should also integrate them into the flash array.
It provides a fast head start, but when dealing with complex situations, it doesn't lead you effectively.
If they could provide me with a troubleshooting document for the issue I was experiencing with connecting to Aruba Central, that would be great.
 

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade is costly but valued for performance, reliability, and reduced administrative overhead, justifying its premium price.
Dell PowerScale, though costly initially, provides valuable features, ease of management, and competitive pricing for business needs.
HPE GreenLake for File Storage offers competitive pricing with predictable costs, despite occasional licensing challenges and regional variability.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) shows it's a premium platform, so it's a big amount of money.
The pricing is excellent.
It provides excellent pricing for massive enterprise customers wishing to remain on-premises while achieving competitive prices to cloud providers without requiring migration.
In summary, it's a predictable cost, but the VMware aspect is a problem.
HPE GreenLake for File Storage is relatively cheaper than Cisco, so that's a big plus.
 

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade excels with ease of use, fast performance, scalability, seamless integration, and efficient storage features.
Dell PowerScale excels in scalability, performance, and security, offering efficient storage consolidation and resource optimization for organizations.
HPE GreenLake for File Storage offers cost-effective, scalable solutions with strong security, intuitive navigation, and reliable support for enhanced operations.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.
In our AI initiatives, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) plays a significant role in data analysis, data fusion; principally, it is involved in data analysis, data extraction, and statistical analysis.
Single files are limited to four terabytes in our configuration, however, the system can support up to 16 terabytes, so we can scale based on that too.
This provides the flexibility of a pay-per-consumption model, allowing me to choose resources without investing in the entire platform.
It's important for my business that the solution has independent scaling of performance and capacity while our storage system is online.
I evaluate the solution's performance for eliminating front-end caching and data movement between media as fast; we don't notice any latency.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Ranking in File and Object Storage
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (15th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Ranking in File and Object Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
NAS (2nd)
HPE GreenLake for File Storage
Ranking in File and Object Storage
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.7%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 8.6%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE GreenLake for File Storage is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File and Object Storage Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)8.6%
HPE GreenLake for File Storage0.4%
Pure Storage FlashBlade5.7%
Other85.3%
File and Object Storage
 

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström - PeerSpot reviewer
Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades
In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.
Scott Taylor - PeerSpot reviewer
Manages large data sets efficiently with hybrid cloud integration
My organization is quite large, with about 30,000 employees. The growth has been substantial in areas such as radiology and genomics. One of the best features we've utilized recently is offload to cloud pools due to capacity constraints on-premise. We didn't want to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) straight away, so we utilized cloud pools to offload some data to Azure. That's really saved us in certain areas as we didn't have funding to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) until next year, which is why we utilized the cloud pools functionality to offload.
NemiGeorge - PeerSpot reviewer
Exceptional service and hands-off infrastructure management enhance data handling and AI workloads
The features of HPE GreenLake for File Storage that I value the most include compute, storage, and managed service, and monitoring managed service. I appreciate the fact that my team doesn't have to manage all the infrastructure every day, handle patches, security updates, and similar tasks. Time saving is an example of how these features have benefited my organization. My team can focus on supporting our core businesses and not worry about infrastructure management. Also, expertise plays a role; we're a first-time HPE GreenLake customer, so having them manage that gives my team the opportunity to upskill without breaking anything.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Media Company
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Logistics Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise36
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The cost is competitive with other vendors such as HP. I always compare prices between two vendors, and they are good...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Sometimes, it takes too long to set up everything. That's something I would want them to improve. The main challenge ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE GreenLake for File Storage?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing in our last journey with HPE GreenLake for File Storage was gre...
What needs improvement with HPE GreenLake for File Storage?
One area for improvement would be a unified management console that brings Infosight analytics and GreenLake provisio...
What is your primary use case for HPE GreenLake for File Storage?
Our current use cases for HPE GreenLake for File Storage include being our main backup storage and main server storage.
 

Also Known As

No data available
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
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,
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. HPE GreenLake for File Storage and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.