Mar 12, 2020
My recommendation is to take a close look at our CS Concerto Scale-Out Cluster system.
NetApp FAS Series and Dell PowerScale are two prominent storage solutions in the enterprise category. User reviews suggest that NetApp FAS Series has an edge in pricing and support, while Dell PowerScale is noted for its wide-ranging features.
Features: NetApp FAS Series is renowned for its high reliability, seamless integration with environments such as VMware and OpenStack, and robust features like snapshots, data protection, and deduplication that enhance efficiency. Dell PowerScale offers advanced management with OneFS, superior scalability, and excellent performance, supporting various protocols and ensuring robust security and cloud integration, which distinguishes it in functionality.
Room for Improvement: NetApp FAS Series could improve performance monitoring, automation, and cloud integration, alongside enhancing cost efficiency and SAN support. Dell PowerScale may enhance load distribution, cloud integration, configuration simplicity, and pricing clarity.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Typically deployed on-premises, both solutions have private and hybrid cloud adoption. NetApp FAS Series is praised for its effective support and proactive monitoring, although faster response times are desirable. Dell PowerScale is noted for scalability with customer support improvements suggested in technical support responsiveness and configuration ease.
Pricing and ROI: Considered costlier, NetApp FAS Series still offers substantial ROI through its feature set and storage consolidation. Dell PowerScale, perceived as expensive, especially for high-capacity needs, delivers ROI via efficient storage management and features like deduplication, necessitating careful pricing structure evaluation.
Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.
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.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's technical support a ten.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
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.
As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues.
I can confirm that we have experienced six years of zero seconds of downtime.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
Firmware or software updates become effortless with Pure, but with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we must evaluate or conduct trial runs to ensure that these operations will not harm our customer's system; their software is not adequate.
It should be made more user-friendly in the sense that if I manage it, I should be able to deploy it without having to have a lot of interaction from support.
Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I believe its governance and security are more important for financial or government sectors, so governance and security will require additional upgrades and hardening.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier.
Costs align well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.
SSDs are more cost-friendly, yet HDDs are higher in cost.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
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.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
With the data management features of Data ONTAP, I have not experienced data loss or unavailability as I have SnapMirror, Snapshot, and SnapVault in place.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Dell PowerScale | 13.3% |
| NetApp FAS Series | 9.8% |
| Other | 76.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 32 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 24 |
| Large Enterprise | 70 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 31 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 59 |
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?
What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?
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.
NetApp FAS Series offers high availability and seamless protocol integration. Known for its robust features such as data replication and efficient storage architecture, it finds use in challenging enterprise environments and virtualization.
NetApp FAS Series delivers valuable enterprise storage capabilities with an emphasis on unified storage architectures supporting SAN and NAS functionalities. Features like high availability, robust snapshot technology, and seamless protocol integration cater to diverse workloads. Data replication through SnapMirror and reliable performance under heavy loads are appreciated. Deduplication and compression enhance storage efficiency while scalability, resilience, and strong customer support further its appeal. Improvements are desired in flexibility, documentation, speed, and affordability. Additionally, its monitoring capabilities and cloud integration need attention. Organizations employ FAS Series for enterprise storage, SQL Server LUNs, Exchange LUNs, VMware, and corporate file sharing.
What are the most notable features of NetApp FAS Series?In industries such as finance and healthcare, NetApp FAS Series is implemented for centralized data management, supporting complex protocols like NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI. This enables efficient handling of virtualization, databases, unified storage tasks, and backup solutions crucial for maintaining unstructured data and redundancy.
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