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Dell PowerScale vs EXAScaler comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Dell PowerScale
Ranking in NAS
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (1st)
EXAScaler
Ranking in NAS
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (8th), Cloud Storage (18th), Storage Performance (3rd), Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 13.3%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of EXAScaler is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale13.3%
EXAScaler1.1%
Other85.6%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

RahulSharma8 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
Unified file sharing has simplified multi-tenant access and has delivered seamless data replication
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory. The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.
reviewer2544219 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Solution enables exceptional performance and immense scalability for AI cluster training
I am a system integrator, and my customers are using EXAScaler as the de facto parallel file system for Google Cloud. They primarily use it for large AI cluster training EXAScaler provides amazing performance in terms of sequential read and random access, and it has a significant scalability…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it uses not just a terabyte but petabytes of data, storing a large amount of data takes within minutes, and you can bring it down to seconds as well, as it does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a platform that is very easy for teams to work with."
"The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon, making it easier and more cost-effective with just one point of contact."
"Dell PowerScale's performance is good."
"PowerScale, in our infrastructure, is really a winning piece because today we have three times the performance on the I/O at an affordable price while greatly improving the performance and reliability of our HPC storage."
"Flexibility from our side, compression of data, plus performance and usability make Dell PowerScale flexible to use, easy to install, and we can sometimes negotiate the price with Dell."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) actually combined a shared file system that scales seamlessly and works effectively, making the blocking and tackling exactly what was advertised."
"The customers who use DDN EXAScaler are happy, especially when using large AI clusters for training."
"EXAScaler provides amazing performance in terms of sequential read and random access, and it has a significant scalability advantage as it is scalable to petabytes."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, it takes too long to set up everything. That's something I would want them to improve."
"I believe the support engineers need to improve their skills."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"Always, there is room for improvement in terms of cybersecurity, as new challenges are continually emerging in the market."
"The management and monitoring tools comprise a disparate suite of products and the roadmap is very unclear. We've got four different products that look after the Isilon, management-wise, and it's a bit of a mess."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, when you then try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code."
"One challenge with EXAScaler is during upgrade time, as it can be problematic when upgrading node by node. Additionally, it is not multi-protocol by nature, requiring additional hardware to support various protocols like NFS or object storage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."
"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."
"The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."
"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."
"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."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Dealing with the product costs and licensing areas is getting easier since Dell is simplifying the licensing process and licensing packages offered to users."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise65
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level of comparison. Although in the current markets we have seen the price differenc...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
There should be some enhancement where Dell PowerScale can have block level functionality or block storage kind of functionality. Although there is a different product line from Dell, if there is s...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
We use Dell PowerScale for our object scale and different kinds of storage, including both object storage and file storage.I am part of the solution architect team, which is a techno-commercial rol...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for EXAScaler?
EXAScaler is a bit expensive, particularly when comparing the total cost of ownership.
What needs improvement with EXAScaler?
One challenge with EXAScaler is during upgrade time, as it can be problematic when upgrading node by node. Additionally, it is not multi-protocol by nature, requiring additional hardware to support...
What is your primary use case for EXAScaler?
I am a system integrator, and my customers are using EXAScaler as the de facto parallel file system for Google Cloud. They primarily use it for large AI cluster training.
 

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,
Information Not Available
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