Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

Dell Technologies and Red Hat are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.9, while Red Hat is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. Dell Technologies holds a 8.2% mindshare in FaOS, compared to Red Hat’s 16.7% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 82% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerScale Isilon are key players in the enterprise storage solutions market. Dell PowerScale Isilon appears to have an edge due to its robust features, although it comes at a higher price point.

Features: Red Hat Ceph Storage offers significant scalability, seamless integration with cloud services, and high availability, ideal for flexible deployments across varied environments. Dell PowerScale Isilon is recognized for handling massive data workloads, providing straightforward data access and management, and offering comprehensive scalability and performance-enhancing features.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat Ceph Storage could benefit from easier initial deployment processes, enhanced user interfaces, and better support for non-standard network configurations. Dell PowerScale Isilon could improve in reducing dependency on hardware-specific features, optimizing costs for small to medium businesses, and integrating more fully with diverse cloud environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat Ceph Storage requires a greater depth of technical knowledge for setup but presents versatile deployment options. Dell PowerScale Isilon is acclaimed for its straightforward deployment process and extensive customer support, facilitating quicker onboarding and immediate operational efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat Ceph Storage's lower setup costs offer a cost-effective solution suitable for smaller to medium-sized organizations with favorable ROI due to its economic scalability. Dell PowerScale Isilon, despite a higher initial investment, ensures strong ROI by efficiently managing large data volumes, making it valuable for large-scale enterprises demanding robust, scalable storage solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

September 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

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 8.2%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ceph Storage is 16.7%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File and Object Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat Ceph Storage	16.7%
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)	8.2%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	5.6%
Other	69.5%

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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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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Rifat Rahman

Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited

Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments

I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

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

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

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

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

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

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together."

"This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use."

"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."

"Dell PowerScale has the SmartConnect and SmartConnect Pro features. That's why I like the product."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a platform that is very easy for teams to work with."

"I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node."

"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."

"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."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"I like the distributed and self-healing nature of the product."

"The setup is very easy, deserving a ten out of ten."

"We are using Ceph internal inexpensive disk and data redundancy without spending extra money on external storage."

"It has helped to save money and scale the storage without limits."

"It's a very performance-intensive, brilliant storage system, and I always recommend it to customers based on its benefits, performance, and scalability."

"The configuration of the solution and the user interface are both quite good."

"The scalability feature is used by all users and is critical for our operations."

"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pros

Cons

"Its configuration should be easier."

"I would like to see better integration."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"Recently, while upgrading the version code, one of the controllers failed. Replacing the controller took between 14 to 20 days."

"The solution is expensive."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"They should add some new services that should be for on-premises, and more analytics should be there for the data, allowing for a deep dive from that analytics, which is currently missing."

"The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement."

"I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon)."

"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."

"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."

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

"We see room for improvement in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because we need personnel to effectively utilize all our infrastructure; it's not easy to find skilled people to work on AI and data analysis."

"Perhaps if there was a local chatbot built within the system or on the dashboard where we could directly ask for anything on the OneFS, it could help us."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."

"I would like to see better performance and stability when Ceph is in recovery."

"Some documentation is very hard to find."

"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."

"We have encountered slight integration issues."

"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth. It needs some deduplication features and to use delta for rebalancing."

"Ceph does not deal very well with, or takes a long time to recover from, certain kinds of network failures and individual storage node failures."

"The management features are pretty good, but they still have room for improvement."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"The price could be cheaper."

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

"The product is very expensive."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price is a little high."

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

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."

"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."

"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."

"The price of the solution is high."

"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 for this solution is reasonable."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."

"There is no cost for software."

"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription as a bundle."

"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."

"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."

"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."

"We never used the paid support."

"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."

More Red Hat Ceph Storage pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

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 of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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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)?

The cost is competitive with other vendors such as HP. I always compare prices between two vendors, and they are good...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

Sometimes, it takes too long to set up everything. That's something I would want them to improve. The main challenge ...

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How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?

Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...

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What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?

The high availability of the solution is important to us.

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What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?

Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...

See all answers

Comparisons

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

Qumulo vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 4% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 16% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 7% of the time

HPE StoreEasy vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

MinIO vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

MinIO vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 42% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 3% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Compared 2% of the time

More Red Hat Ceph Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

October 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

November 2025

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Ceph Storage

October 2025

Download Red Hat Ceph Storage product report

Also Known As

No data available

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

Ceph

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

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

Red Hat

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,

Dell, DreamHost

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

September 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage

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