Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) enhances cost efficiency, scalability, and resource allocation, offering notable ROI and reliability despite some higher costs.
Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
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.
The second cluster of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) gives us flexibility for small things like code upgrades, all the way to scenarios where we have lost this data center or data, allowing us to check if data is still intact on the other side.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
Dell PowerScale receives mixed reviews on support, praised for escalation handling but criticized for initial delays and communication issues.
Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Dell provides support within four hours, and they always fulfill their promises.
They have managed previous issues well.
I would evaluate the customer service and technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as great.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Dell PowerScale offers scalable, flexible storage solutions, easily expanding to meet demands, though often needing technical support for setup.
Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
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.
Dell PowerScale is highly scalable, as evidenced by the reduced physical hardware and the efficient use of rack space.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Dell PowerScale is praised for exceptional stability, near-perfect uptime, easy management, and seamless integration into existing systems.
Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect.
I find the product to be resilient and stable. There's no downtime and no crashes.
I find Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to be very stable and reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerScale faces challenges in cost, cloud integration, complexity, and user demands for better pricing, support, and efficiency improvements.
StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
Hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline.
I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).
If I could improve one thing on Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it would be better object storage as it recently breached into S3, and that capability could be broadened.
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerScale is costly but seen as worthwhile due to features, flexible licensing, and ease of management.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) shows it's a premium platform, so it's a big amount of money.
The pricing is excellent.
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) offers scalable, efficient storage with advanced management, data protection, and security features for versatile workloads.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Ranking in NAS
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (3rd)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Ranking in NAS
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 17.7%, up from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Storage Appliance is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Scott Taylor - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.
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.
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I would make Dell PowerScale (Isilon) better by improving SmartSync in the graphical user interface. Currently, everything has to be done through the command line, and I prefer having a graphical i...
What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
 

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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,
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. StarWind Storage Appliance and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.