"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."
"You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to it, and IT spreads out the load. We've added multiple nodes to the system since deploying it. The process is pretty seamless, and we are able to do it with no downtime. It's a very easy process to do."
"The recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression has drastically improved our efficiency ratios to make it an economical product. This solution has also had a positive impact on our employees' productivity because it reduces the amount of admin that our staff needs to handle."
"There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great."
"It assists with eliminating storage silos because it provides SMB and NFS protocols. PowerScale has also helped free up our employee's time to focus on other business priorities."
"The stability of the solution is good."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"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"
"I like most of the features. Its speed, performance, and availability are valuable. We are implementing the data reduction technology the most."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"It's a mature product. It's like a BMW that evolves consistently."
"IBM's technical support do excellent work."
"The initial setup is straightforward and can be done in an hour and a half by one person."
"Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly."
"When it comes to the interface of the solution we did not encounter any challenges. Additionally, the solution has good documentation."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"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."
"Data storage performance needs to be improved."
"I'd like to see more Iceland products in the cloud so that we can port our data into different environments if needed. I would also like to see a virtual appliance or software-defined Iceland product."
"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."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"Sometimes the performance is effective but it gets resolved in the process."
"The price is very costly."
"A big area for improvement is that the data reduction pool feature is not recommended for use in a production environment because it has stability and performance issues."
"It is slightly more expensive, however, it all depends on your supplier."
"The pricing could be improved, but I think it's getting better and better with each version. IBM needs to implement NAS storage again, as this is a big flaw. Dell EMC is very good at this and if you compared them based on NAS storage, Dell EMC would win right away. IBM's solution for NAS storage is very complicated. We don't have a storage box that provides file sharing from itself, we have to put software on it and go through a whole complicated process. It should be simplified."
"The interface could improve in IBM FlashSystem."
"The deduplication and compression ratio is not very good. It's not reaching a very high ratio."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 3rd in NAS with 22 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 2nd in NAS with 33 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.2, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) writes "As you add more nodes in a cluster, you get more effective utilisation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "Reliable and easy to configure with simple data migration capabilities ". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Qumulo, HPE StoreEasy, Dell ECS and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE Nimble Storage and Dell Unity XT. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
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