We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Nasuni 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."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 most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"The tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."
"For maximizing storage utilization, PowerScale is great. When you write the data to it, it spreads it out to all the nodes, so you get all the performance from the entire pool."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale's performance is good."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol."
"Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using about eight to 10 different types of vendors or small storage boxes for provisioning and shared access for users. We got rid of all those. That has eliminated operational overhead and footprint at our data center. We don't have to worry about any hardware or monitoring particular devices, and hundreds of devices have been decommissioned. Now, for provisioning, everything is on Nasuni. I assume this has made a big difference in costs."
"One of Nasuni's best characteristics is its fully redundant system; we don't have to shift tapes or use other backup solutions. It's a good, full-featured product."
"Nasuni is tremendously easy to manage. It eliminates many of the administrative challenges associated with physical hardware storage, and you don't need to worry about any hardware failure or products reaching the end of their lives."
"The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud."
"Another helpful feature, in addition to restoring a file that was deleted within 24 to 48 hours, is that we have the ability to restore a file or a folder that was deleted, going all the way back to the inception of that file or folder. That means we actually have unlimited backups to the inception point of data with Nasuni."
"The Nasuni management dashboard is helpful because, on the administration side, I'm able to view all of the different filers that we have in the UK, rather than check each one of them individually."
"The global file locking feature is valuable. The ability to quickly deploy new sites is also valuable."
"We've used it to provide file source capacity for VDI environments. The security of it is important and the fact that it's object storage, it's immutable and that it can't be held for ransom. It's a lot smoother than our previous processes that weren't Nasuni-based. A lot of it is done automatically just by the system being in place."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."
"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price."
"As administrators, we are used to having control equal to managing an on-prem device. In terms of log analysis and other things we want to do, Nasuni has some limitations limitation on what you do on the Nasuni. Nasuni could add some features to the GUI that make administration a little easier. It's tough when I have to move from one filter to another because there is no way to search it. We have to scroll up and down to find the name of it."
"We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that."
"I would like to see Nasuni create a Dropbox or Box alternative. One of the things that people like about those tools is that they are very easy to implement. They look just like a file server. With Nasuni, you have to be online to get your file storage. With Dropbox, there is a thing running on your PC that downloads the files to it when you need them, i.e., an agent."
"The user-friendliness of its access needs improvement. When I log into the console, I see all the files that we handle globally. There are hundreds of Nasuni files that I can see on the console, but no way that I can filter them down. While this is a small thing, I need to scroll down and select the ones that I want. "Control F" doesn't work nor is there a dropdown menu that I can click on and select the ones that I want."
"I would like to see improvement in the training Nasuni provides. Compared to some of the other vendors out there, like Microsoft, where you can find how-to videos, Nasuni only has a lot of PDF documents that you have to go hunting for. It's workable, it certainly isn't a problem, but video walkthroughs would always be helpful."
"The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue."
"I would like to see them improve their tools in regards to accessing data using smartphones, tablets, and iPads. I think the Nasuni app could be improved to make access to the data cleaner and more efficient."
"One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 37 reviews while Nasuni is ranked 3rd in NAS with 35 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Nasuni is rated 8.8. 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 Nasuni writes "We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and Huawei OceanStor 9000, whereas Nasuni is most compared with WekaFS, Panzura, Azure NetApp Files, PeerGFS and Qumulo. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni report.
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