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.

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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: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo

May 2025

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"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 has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"It's very easy-to-use."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The solution provides many controllers."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"Features like ransomware protection, file lock retention, and third-party integrations (e.g., Superna for ransomware protection) are significant benefits."

"We use the solution internally to support our own managed servers and run our own support center."

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

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

"Based on the flexibility of the system itself, it was easy for us to manage the growth by buying individual nodes as needed."

"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 helps in saving costs related to power and rack space, reducing physical hardware from over one hundred to twenty-nine chassis."

"The tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

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

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

"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 most valuable feature is real-time analytics."

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

Cons

"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."

"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."

"I would like to have Snapshots and Snapmail in the next release. People who came from a NetApp background, especially expect these features."

"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."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

"In terms of technical support, the experience has been mixed. 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."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"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 solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."

"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."

"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."

"The price always has room for improvement."

"PowerScale is not suitable for virtual environments."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit expensive compared to other products."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a little bit pricey, and its pricing could be improved."

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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"The product is very expensive."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"The price is a little high."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."

"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."

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

"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."

"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"The price of Qumulo is reasonable."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

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)?

We have to go through a certified reseller for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). From a value standpoint, it performs very well.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

I would make Dell PowerScale (Isilon) better by improving SmartSync in the graphical user interface. Currently, every...

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Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Pure FlashArray X NVMe vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 3% of the time

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NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Compared 11% 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

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VAST Data vs Qumulo

Compared 14% of the time

NetApp FAS Series vs Qumulo

Compared 10% of the time

Scality RING vs Qumulo

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Qumulo

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

June 2025

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Buyer's Guide

NAS

June 2025

Download Qumulo product report

Also Known As

No data available

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

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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 EMC PowerScale (Isilon) storage solutions are designed to help manage data for enterprises of all types. Dell PowerScale systems are simple to install, manage, and scale to virtually any size and include a choice of all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes. Dell PowerScale solutions stay flexible and reliable no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future.

With Dell PowerScale, your data lake always stays simple to manage, simple to grow, simple to protect, and simple enough to handle the most demanding current and future workloads.

Ideal for companies of any size, from small enterprises to multi-national ones, Dell PowerScale storage provides secure collaboration, modular scalability, flexible consumption models, and easy cloud integrations, all with management tools spanning multiple platforms.

Key Benefits of Dell EMC PowerScale Storage

Centralized management: Manage your storage infrastructure from a single unified platform.
Data protection: Dell PowerScale offers security, data protection and replication tools. Back up and protect your data from cyber-attacks with an integrated ransomware defense system.
Artificial intelligence: PowerScale is the foundation for building an integrated and optimized IT infrastructure for AI projects, from concept to production.
Cloud support: Store and manage your data on the cloud and move data between your data center and the cloud. Dell PowerScale runs data-intensive cloud workloads with no outbound traffic costs.
Long-term storage: Dell PowerScale offers highly efficient and resilient active archive storage or long-term data retention for large-scale data archives. With the proven scalability architecture of PowerScale, you can meet your growing archiving demands. Dell PowerScale has a wide variety of enterprise-grade data protection and security options to keep your archived data safe.

Reviews from Real Users

Dell EMC PowerScale storage stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its scalability capabilities and its user-friendly centralized management system.

Rachel B., a chief operations officer & acting CFO at Like a Photon, writes, "PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale."

Keith B., the director of IT at NatureFresh Farms, writes, "The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes, and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."

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

May 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: May 2025.

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