We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Veeam Backup & Replication based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."
"The tool's most valuable features are scalability and stability."
"Since it can scale so easily, as long as I have money to buy more nodes, I can grow it as big as I need to. That is important in our business. As sequencing technologies continue to evolve, and as those technologies evolve, the amount of data generation never gets smaller. It just always seems to get bigger. This is one of the absolute key aspects: We can grow on demand without having to forklift stuff."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol."
"Replication is most valuable."
"The direct SAN backup feature perfectly integrates with our 3PAR storage infrastructure."
"The standout feature for us is instant recovery."
"One of the best things about Veeam is that they have consistently improved on themselves since they started. Personally, I've been using Veeam since around 2013/2014 when it was only supporting certain hypervisors such as HyperV, and since then it has become truly mature enterprise-level software with a lot of versatility."
"Simple and stable."
"Veeam communicates with the vCenter in VMware, which means it's very smooth and doesn't interrupt production on VMware and you can backup or restore anytime, anywhere."
"A simple and stable solution for small businesses that use virtualization."
"The granular restoration that it provides for a business application is most valuable. For example, for Exchange, we can restore a single mailbox or email. We can also do SQL Server restoration and bare-metal recovery for operating systems."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."
"Veeam Backup Replication could improve by making the monitoring system free. If I would like to have any monitoring system by Veeam I have to purchase it. It should come free with the solution. They should provide a monitoring system to make the work easier and smooth."
"The parallel backup process from the Veeam server to Veeam has some limitations. The number of parallel backups should be increased and the compressional is very low. Sometimes it is half or one-third, but other backup solutions' compression levels are very high."
"The cost needs to be considered."
"They fixed everything that I was hoping for. It is pretty good. There were a few things in 9.x that I was wishing for, and they came true in version 10. We were looking for retention without having to make a copy job. We're getting ready to migrate m365 to the cloud. I haven't dived into it to make sure, but I wish the m365 backup would integrate into the current console so that we don't have to use two different consoles."
"I don't see much room for improvement except that the price could be better."
"The ease of use could be improved, but I don't have a very deep amount of experience in Veeam, so it's difficult to say what could be improved."
"The deduplication feature could be improved by changing to global deduplication."
"This is an expensive solution."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 37 reviews while Veeam Backup & Replication is ranked 1st in Backup and Recovery with 328 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Veeam Backup & Replication is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) writes "We can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Veeam Backup & Replication writes "Beneficial pricing model, user friendly interface, and many free features". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Veeam Backup & Replication is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Azure Backup, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup and Zerto.
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Assuming you want to keep the data within the datacenter, there are a few options:
For Small deployments (~20-100TB's), you could mount share(s) on any backup (media) server and backup the data up over the network using a file-system agent - Veeam could easily support this.
For Medium deployments (~100TB - 1PB), you could use any backup system that supports NDMP. Not sure if Veeam supports NDMP for Isilon, but there are a lot of other vendors that do.
For Large deployments (~1PB+), you may want to consider snap-replicate-snap - Kind of like the NetApp approach to data protection. Take Snapshots of the local Isilon, replicate to a remote (DR) Isilon, and take a snapshot of the DR Isilon. Some may argue that this is not a true backup methodology, but it scales well and you can set up many SyncIQ jobs with different RPO settings to support complex scenarios.
There are a number of alternative cloud solutions available e.g. Druva.
However, if the price is a key factor then you may benefit from by using an Managed Service Provider (MSP). MSP's white label large, credible & established platforms. They provide the same level of speed, uptime, resilience and security as a key brand name but can be as much as half the price. The management of the backup will be optionally yours or fully outsourced to the MSP.
Another benefit of the MSP model is that they will have other skills to complement your own internal resources potentially adding further layers of security and backend IT people to support your operation.
I have no experience with Dell EMC PowerScale though I do know that it is supported by Veeam.
A Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository can distribute the load across the PowerScale cluster via multiple Backup Repository Extents each defined to use a different cluster node DNS A record and path. When backups exceed the maximum file size limitation even with Veeam deduplication and compression, other considerations should be made.
Note: Disable the write coalescer on the share directory and all sub-directories used by Veeam. PowerScale is a complex system and therefore I would advise you to contact Veeam experts on how to deploy Veeam in accordance with PowerScale. But a Scale Out Back Repository is an option, also XFS with reflink supports any Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) configuration. MSP's are fine too if you are comfortable with having data outside your datacenter.
dsmISI VEEAM (general-storage.com)
It is possible to do it with most types of backup solutions, such as IBM Spectrum Protect.
But it requires a full scan to detect changed files.
The changed files will be the only part that will be sent to the IBM Spectrum Protect storage, using its progressive incremental forever (Always incremental backups).
It is also possible to use NDMP to protect Isilon storage, but that requires periodical full copies, and as Isilon can scale to multiple PB in size. It might not be efficient.
Regards,
Tomas
I did not have the opportunity to backup Isilon servers but, according to Veeam documentation, it is possible to backup NDMP servers data to tape. There are some limitations though: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/d...