

Dell PowerScale and Dell PowerStore are competitors in the enterprise storage solutions market, with PowerScale having the edge in scalability and unified storage management, while PowerStore excels in integration with VMware and data reduction capabilities.
Features: Dell PowerScale is well-suited for high-performance, large-scale storage needs due to its ease of management and scalability using the OneFS operating system. It supports features like SmartQuotas and policy-based management. PowerStore is designed for versatility within VMware environments, supports NVMe storage, and offers advanced data reduction features like compression and deduplication, making it efficient for rapid access.
Room for Improvement: Dell PowerScale is less cost-effective for smaller operations, displaying a lack of native cloud integration. Enhancements are needed in areas such as NFS support and load distribution. Dell PowerStore needs improvements in data reduction consistency and integration with VMware. It would benefit from better synchronous replication and enhanced cybersecurity features.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both solutions offer strong on-premises deployment. PowerStore extends options to public and private clouds, providing greater flexibility. Their technical support is recognized for reliability, although both can improve support consistency. Dell's proactive service is appreciated across products.
Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale is perceived as high-priced but justified by its performance and scalability, yielding substantial ROI by lowering administrative costs. Dell PowerStore also comes with a premium price but offers a favorable price-to-performance ratio, credited to its effective NVMe capabilities and operational flexibility, resulting in a commendable total cost of ownership.
Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.
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.
If you purchase storage with 300 terabytes, you can easily achieve one petabyte of effective capacity.
It's been trouble-free the entire time, with very high performance, as it has been designed and built properly.
We have seen a return on our investment in Dell PowerStore; definitely our cost per terabyte has been very good compared to some of the other vendors that we would have been using previously, and our performance benchmarks have exceeded what we were expecting.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's technical support a ten.
I would rate the technical support of Dell PowerStore between nine and ten out of ten.
They're responsive, knowledgeable, and have a quick turnaround.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell support as a ten, focusing on that aspect alone, because it's what allows me to sleep at night.
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.
As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.
We have approximately 100,000 people using it in our company, which demonstrates the scale at which we are utilizing Dell PowerStore.
It has built-in health monitoring, and management is supported with VMware plugins, SNMP protocol, and it provides an HTML5 graphical interface.
The ability to add capacity in single drive increments is important to my organization, as it provides flexibility beyond the usual vendor-defined packs.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues.
I can confirm that we have experienced six years of zero seconds of downtime.
When I removed all the cables, it failed over within five minutes.
It's quite stable and reliable in general.
I have not experienced any downtime, bugs, or glitches, and it's much better than previous technologies.
Firmware or software updates become effortless with Pure, but with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we must evaluate or conduct trial runs to ensure that these operations will not harm our customer's system; their software is not adequate.
It should be made more user-friendly in the sense that if I manage it, I should be able to deploy it without having to have a lot of interaction from support.
Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I believe its governance and security are more important for financial or government sectors, so governance and security will require additional upgrades and hardening.
Security including AI support, with more flexibility and less user intervention, would be valuable.
AI capabilities would also increase the security side of the array by easily identifying any bugs or known issues so we can fix them very quickly.
More detailed performance insights and predictive analytics would help resolve issues more proactively.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier.
Costs align well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.
Based on my experience, the cost of Dell PowerStore for around 500 GB of capacity is very competitive compared to any other platform in the market.
I asked for a new quotation on a server, and it is quite expensive; it is really expensive.
We question that quite often because they have been increased by thirty to thirty-five percent every quarter for unexplained reasons, and that definitely does not go down well with customers.
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.
The faster the back-end storage, the quicker the entire application performs.
I consolidated all the data into a single dashboard accessible via Dell PowerStore Manager, which improves performance and IT infrastructure.
Due to the low latency on IOPS, it helps us with our critical apps that cannot afford delays.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Dell PowerScale | 12.9% |
| Dell PowerStore | 8.1% |
| Other | 79.0% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 32 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 24 |
| Large Enterprise | 70 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 83 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 49 |
| Large Enterprise | 124 |
As a storage engine in Dell AI Data Platform, Dell PowerScale is the world's #1 scale-out NAS platform for enterprise unstructured data. Trusted by more than 25,000 customers, including more than 1,500 customers running GPU workloads, PowerScale uses OneFS operating system to provide a single namespace and unified file and object access for AI/ML training, RAG pipelines, analytics, media production, and life sciences, and other demanding workloads. PowerScale F710 was the world’s first Ethernet-based storage appliance certified with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Selected configurations support NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, pNFS, and NFS over RDMA for high-throughput parallel AI data access. PowerScale supports near-linear, non-disruptive scaling from terabytes to petabytes. Available in all-flash, hybrid, and archive configurations for on-premises and cloud deployment options, including AWS and Azure. Supported next-generation configurations deliver up to 35 GB/s read throughput per node.
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?
What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?
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 PowerStore offers a scalable and high-performance foundation designed for both modern and traditional workloads, optimizing IT operations through advanced automation and intelligent data reduction.
PowerStore supports seamless scalability and high availability, serving as a flexible storage platform. It integrates with VMware and other systems, simplifying data management and enhancing performance. PowerStore provides robust security, cost savings, and efficient workload consolidation with an NVMe-based architecture.
What are the essential features of Dell PowerStore?Dell PowerStore is widely used in VMware infrastructure for hosting virtual machines, databases, and block storage. Its robust performance and integration capabilities make it ideal for high-performance workloads and data protection in sectors like financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare. With NVMe architecture, it supports efficient data management, facilitating effective virtualization and enterprise storage environments.
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