Dell PowerScale vs QNAP NAS Storage comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Dell Technologies and QNAP are both solutions in the NAS category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while QNAP is ranked #13 with an average rating of 9.0. Dell Technologies holds a 12.9% mindshare in N, compared to QNAP’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of QNAP users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerScale

Read 114 Dell PowerScale reviews

20,036 Views
11,220 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

QNAP NAS Storage

Read 1 QNAP NAS Storage review

1,384 Views
1,384 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerScale

QNAP NAS Storage

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 8, 2026

Dell PowerScale Isilon and QNAP NAS Storage compete in the network-attached storage market. Dell PowerScale typically leads with its scalability and support for enterprise environments, while QNAP offers a budget-friendly option with strong functionality for small to medium businesses.

Features: Dell PowerScale Isilon provides seamless scalability, advanced data management capabilities, and the OneFS operating system, enhancing enterprise performance and reliability. QNAP NAS Storage delivers versatile applications, multimedia capabilities, and virtual machine support, meeting the needs of smaller businesses requiring flexibility and multiple functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerScale offers a robust deployment model for extensive IT infrastructures with premium customer support, ideal for complex setups. QNAP NAS Storage provides a straightforward installation process favorable to users new to network storage, combined with adequate customer service, highlighting the trade-off between Dell's comprehensive deployment and QNAP's user-friendly setup.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale Isilon requires a significant initial investment, aligning with enterprises seeking long-term, large-scale ROI, justified by its advanced capabilities and support. QNAP NAS Storage, known for cost-effectiveness, offers a lower initial cost with competitive ROI for smaller businesses focused on affordability and feature accessibility, showcasing Dell's premium model against QNAP's value-driven strategy.

To learn more, read our detailed NAS Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

NAS

October 2026

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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

Dell PowerScale

Ranking in NAS

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

114

Ranking in other categories

File and Object Storage (1st)

QNAP NAS Storage

Ranking in NAS

13th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

2.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 12.9%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QNAP NAS Storage is 2.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale	12.9%
QNAP NAS Storage	2.3%
Other	84.8%

NAS

Featured Reviews

Santosh Bharadwaj Rangavajjula

Product Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

File sharing has supported collaboration and disaster recovery but security support still needs work

Dell PowerScale can improve specifically for AI workloads, particularly on the MCPs. I would add that we have not seen an official MCP from Dell PowerScale and are relying on open source. It would be valuable to have an MCP server that we can set up directly with them. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security could be better. We have Superna that we buy along with Dell PowerScale, but we are seeing very big problems with integrating it. Superna is primarily for the security use case, as we want to prevent cybersecurity attacks and ransomware attacks. If Dell is providing this as a supplementary feature, it should provide better support. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I do not see much accuracy and reliability of output. This is actually a security problem because Dell does not provide official MCP servers while most other vendors are providing it. This forces us to rely on open source, which is not secure. Dell PowerScale plays a role in my organization's AI initiatives as we want to use the Metadata IQ functionality from Dell PowerScale; however, there is not enough support and extensive documentation for us to be able to do this.

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reviewer2847057

Associate Engineer Systems And Security at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Unified storage has boosted recurring revenue and expanded data protection for diverse clients

In my experience, the best features QNAP NAS Storage offers are its focus on network-attached storage and its full ecosystem with applications. We can use it as an NVR without needing another NVR for a company. We can use the storage device as an NVR in QNAP NAS Storage. QNAP NAS Storage provides universal drivers, so not only QNAP's hard disks and SSDs can be used, but also universal brand hard disks and SSDs. QNAP NAS Storage also has myQNAPcloud storage for backup, hybrid backup solution, and Boxafe application, offering several applications to create a full solution ecosystem according to organizational requirements. The feature that stands out as most valuable to my customers is Boxafe because most organizations use Google and Microsoft, so they need to back up their Google and Microsoft data. We provide them Boxafe as a solution with QNAP NAS Storage, along with hybrid backup. I want to emphasize that we can use QNAP NAS Storage for every kind of industry, such as video editing, video creation, photography, healthcare, industrial, and enterprise IT. It provides backup and data protection, centralized management, and centralized access. It is very useful for every industry, so we give solutions according to their requirements, gathering different kinds of requirements from customers to provide suitable network-attached storage based on performance, hard disk capacity, and storage capacity. Often, customers request expansion units when storage capacity exceeds requirements, network expansion cards for network expansion, and parts from QNAP NAS Storage's brand.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression has drastically improved our efficiency ratios to make it an economical product. This solution has also had a positive impact on our employees' productivity because it reduces the amount of admin that our staff needs to handle."

"The stability of the solution is good."

"PowerScale has made it extremely easy to scale file data across our organization. We have two implementations of Isilon. One is a replica of the other. When scaling, we add nodes to each location and expand the cluster. The process is straightforward."

"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."

"The performance, overall, is quite impressive."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) helps improve the way the organization functions through massive scalability, high performance, a single file system, high availability and reliability, flexible protocols, support for NFS, SMB, HDFS, strong security, cloud integration, efficiency, data protection, snapshot, queue, and sync queue, optimized for unstructured data."

"Dell PowerScale aligns with my organization's strategic goals by improving operational efficiency."

"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."

More Dell PowerScale pros

"QNAP NAS Storage provides universal drivers, so not only QNAP's hard disks and SSDs can be used, but also universal brand hard disks and SSDs."

Cons

"We have issues in Brazil with the procurement of solutions because we have to check the entire market and justify the pricing to our audit institutions, making it difficult to keep with the same vendor."

"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."

"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."

"The existing integration is there, but the only negative point I see about Dell PowerScale is mainly the pricing perspective because it is not intended for SMBs, but for enterprise customers."

"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."

"From the disadvantages perspective, if I need to replace a drive, I must shut down that node."

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

"I would like to see improvements in data deduplication. In our environment, the deduplication ratio is approximately 2 or 2.3 to 1, so I believe there can be enhancements in this area."

More Dell PowerScale cons

"I think QNAP NAS Storage can improve by focusing more on their hard disks, as hard disk prices have increased in the industry."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"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."

"Dealing with the product costs and licensing areas is getting easier since Dell is simplifying the licensing process and licensing packages offered to users."

More Dell PowerScale pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Comms Service Provider

20%

Manufacturing Company

18%

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	70

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

When it comes to pricing for Dell PowerScale, I find it reasonable. As you may expect, it is a high-end enterprise solution, so it comes with a price that is not expensive but not cheap. However, i...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

I believe Dell PowerScale can be improved by advancing its AI capabilities further. For instance, when we fetch data, it could potentially display multiple options of how the data looks in differen...

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What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

Dell PowerScale serves as a premier scale-out network-attached storage solution that I primarily use for data storage and managing mass volumes of unstructured data. I use it to handle different do...

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What needs improvement with QNAP NAS Storage?

I think QNAP NAS Storage can improve by focusing more on their hard disks, as hard disk prices have increased in the industry. In Sri Lanka, we face a challenging situation finding hard disks at th...

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What is your primary use case for QNAP NAS Storage?

My main use case for QNAP NAS Storage is that we are a distributor company, providing QNAP NAS Storage for customers according to their requirements. Partners bring us their deals for NAS storages,...

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What advice do you have for others considering QNAP NAS Storage?

I would rate QNAP NAS Storage a nine out of ten. I choose nine out of ten for QNAP NAS Storage because, while we work with some other network-attached storages, most of the time, according to custo...

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Comparisons

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 15% of the time

Everpure FlashBlade vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 8% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 4% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 3% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale

Compared 3% of the time

More Dell PowerScale Competitors

NetApp FAS Series vs QNAP NAS Storage

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs QNAP NAS Storage

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp Private Storage vs QNAP NAS Storage

Compared 13% of the time

FreeNAS vs QNAP NAS Storage

Compared 9% of the time

HPE StoreEasy vs QNAP NAS Storage

Compared 7% of the time

More QNAP NAS Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale

November 2026

Download Dell PowerScale product report

Buyer's Guide

NAS

October 2026

Download QNAP NAS Storage product report

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

No data available

Overview

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?

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

QNAP NAS Storage offers a robust network-attached storage solution tailored for efficient data management within enterprises, providing secure and flexible data access, backup, and collaborative tools.

QNAP NAS Storage stands out in its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing IT infrastructures while delivering high-performance storage and data management capabilities. This system supports multi-cloud environments, providing centralized file storage and sharing across teams. Its intuitive management interface and extensive app ecosystem simplify administrative tasks, ensuring streamlined deployment and operation within professional environments.

What are the most important features of QNAP NAS Storage?

Data Protection: Offers RAID configurations and snapshots for ensuring data integrity and quick recovery.
Scalability: Easily expand storage capacity without disrupting operations, adapting to growing business needs.
Cross-Platform Support: Enables seamless file access and sharing across different operating systems.
Comprehensive App Support: Provides a wide range of applications to enhance productivity and connectivity.
Security: Advanced encryption and multi-factor authentication protect data from unauthorized access.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Cost-Efficiency: Reduces capital expenses by consolidating storage needs.
Improved Data Management: Simplifies data handling, reducing administrative overhead.
Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitates team collaboration through centralized file sharing and version control.
Reliability: Minimizes downtime with robust data protection and system redundancy features.
Integration Flexibility: Provides seamless integration with third-party services and cloud solutions.

QNAP NAS Storage is implemented across various industries, including media, healthcare, and finance, where secure and efficient data handling is critical. Media companies utilize its capability to store and retrieve large multimedia files rapidly, while healthcare institutions rely on its secure data management features for patient records. Financial institutions benefit from its robust protection features, ensuring compliance with regulations while managing sensitive financial data.

QNAP

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, CTERA and others in NAS. Updated: October 2026.

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