Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Qumulo comparison

Dell Technologies and Qumulo are both solutions in the NAS category. Dell Technologies is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8, while Qumulo is ranked #11. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Qumulo users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Qumulo compete in providing scalable storage solutions. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is noted for its strong support and competitive pricing, while Qumulo is recognized for its superior innovative features.

Features: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is praised for its robust scalability, seamless integration capabilities, and strong financial value. It is renowned for its reliable performance and ability to integrate with other solutions. Qumulo stands out with its enhanced data analytics, real-time visibility, and data-driven decision-making capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) can enhance its ease of deployment and reduce technical resources needed for traditional processes. There's room to streamline its feature updates and documentation. Qumulo's pricing can be a hurdle, requiring cost reductions or more accessible pricing structures. It may benefit from improved failover capabilities and enhanced customer engagement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Qumulo is praised for its simplicity and efficiency in deployment, supported by expert customer service. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) follows a more traditional deployment process, offering comprehensive customer support that's well-regarded.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) offers competitive pricing with a satisfactory ROI due to its balanced feature set. In contrast, Qumulo's premium pricing reflects its advanced features, justifying a high return on investment for those leveraging its capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo

August 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 867,676 peers since 2012

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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

Read full review

Scott Taylor

Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

VinceVitro

Senior Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Useful data sharing, simple cluster scaling, and excellent support

One aspect of Qumulo that I hoped to see improved was its software upgrade process, which did see significant progress during my usage. Initially, upgrading the software resulted in several minutes of system downtime. However, by the time I departed last summer, the downtime had reduced to mere ten seconds. Although I am unsure if Qumulo has yet achieved a completely outage-free upgrade, I simply performed the upgrades early in the morning before the marketing department began its workday, so any downtime was inconsequential.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."

"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."

"Dell PowerScale's performance is good."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale is its scalability."

"Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us."

"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature for me is SyncIQ."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"The most valuable features of Qumulo are its rolling updates and all-day availability."

"The most valuable feature is real-time analytics."

"The most valuable features of Qumulo are the ease of management and special permissions that are quick to enable. The overall performance of the solution is good."

"The feature that I like most is the analytics part of the file system."

"The most valuable feature of Qumulo is the ability to share files and reliability."

"It is a very stable product. I never faced any issues."

"The data protection algorithm to protect the data between the nodes has been the most valuable feature. The integration with backup platforms such as Veeam and Veritas has also been valuable."

"The ratio of total operational cost to complexity versus feature set is very good."

Cons

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

"The solution is expensive."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program."

"The analytics could be improved."

"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."

"Pricing is an issue. It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have."

"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."

"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."

"The price always has room for improvement."

"The price of the solution could be reduced."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"The price of the software is a bit expensive, so a reduction in cost would make it more competitive."

"In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates."

"Some anti-theft permissions do not transfer well to Qumulo."

"The solution could improve availability and improve data protection or data services such as compression of deduplication. In a future release, we'd like to have more cloud API integrations."

"The support for iMac and protocols should be improved, not all features are available."

"In the next release, I would like to see the ability to have more control at a terminal level of the file system."

"One aspect of Qumulo that I hoped to see improved was its software upgrade process, which did see significant progress during my usage. Initially, upgrading the software resulted in several minutes of system downtime. However, by the time I departed last summer, the downtime had reduced to mere ten seconds. Although I am unsure if Qumulo has yet achieved a completely outage-free upgrade, I simply performed the upgrades early in the morning before the marketing department began its workday, so any downtime was inconsequential."

"Qumulo should continue to expand automation and orchestration capabilities."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is a hardware appliance, and it's very expensive if you compare its price with other solutions. You can get the same features and benefits from its competitor, VAST Data, but for half the price of Pure Storage FlashBlade."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."

"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."

"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time."

"We use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."

"The price of the solution is high."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is in the middle range compared to others. We look at the price per terabyte."

"The price of Qumulo is reasonable."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	36

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	2

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wa...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

With every iteration of the OneFS system, new features are being added, and the UI is being updated here and there. S...

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 3% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 16% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 9% of the time

HPE StoreEasy vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

VAST Data vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

VAST Data vs Qumulo

Compared 12% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Qumulo

Compared 10% of the time

Scality RING vs Qumulo

Compared 8% of the time

Nasuni vs Qumulo

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Qumulo

Compared 5% of the time

More Qumulo Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

September 2025

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Buyer's Guide

NAS

August 2025

Download Qumulo product report

Also Known As

No data available

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Dell PowerScale leads in unstructured data management with unified file and object storage, massive scalability, security, and cloud adaptability, enhancing AI, analytics, and enterprise applications with exceptional performance and resilience.

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?

Single-pane management: Simplifies data control and monitoring through a unified interface.
SyncIQ: Ensures efficient data replication for business continuity.
SmartQuotas: Provides intelligent quota management for optimized storage allocation.
Multi-protocol support: Facilitates cross-platform data access and integration.
Seamless storage expansion: Allows effortless scaling to accommodate growing data needs.

What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Operational efficiency: Reduces workload with easy management and automation.
Enhanced security: Offers comprehensive data protection and recovery options.
Scalability: Supports large-scale data storage with flexible growth capabilities.
Performance: Delivers high-speed data processing for demanding applications.
Integration flexibility: Adapts to on-prem and hybrid cloud environments for diverse deployment needs.

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.

Dell Technologies

Qumulo is a data storage and management platform that promotes object-based storage for users, backup archives, and surveillance. Its primary use case is to provide a cost-effective and feature-rich solution for managing large data.

Qumulo's data protection algorithm ensures the safety of node data, while its integration with backup platforms like Veeam and Veritas makes it easy to manage backups. The platform offers a good balance between operational cost and complexity versus feature set, making it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.

Qumulo

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,

County of Riverside Sheriff Department, Hyundai Mobis Automotive North America, University of Arizona, UCSD - San Diego Supercomputer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Sinclair Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Kaiser Permanente, Deluxe Creative, Vexcel Imaging, University of Florida, The Madison Square Garden Company, Arizona State University, Cinesite, San Diego Padres Baseball, Johns Hopkins University - School of Medicine, IHME, EllieMae, Washington State University.

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo

August 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo report.

See our list of best NAS vendors and best File and Object Storage vendors.

We monitor all NAS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.