Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

I use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for NAS. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) plays a role in my AI initiatives.

My favorite feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it uses a file system compared to other SAN products that we have in Dell, which is a best feature because it is a file storage or file system.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has improved my organization as it broadens the core skills. You get to know the difference between the networks because you are not just working with storage. You will also need to know the difference between the network used, the storage used, the compute used, or the relationship between a client, server, and its architecture. It actually broadens your perspective and broadens your skill sets. You can improve more, and in three years, there have been a lot of changes even in Dell PowerScale (Isilon), so you also upgrade along with it.

When it comes to Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I think that because it differs when you have a normal customer and a developer, usually we know what is needed and how we use it, everything. If you ask this question to someone who really needs the product, I think they will be more open and can say what they need. But usually when you are an employee, you will get all kinds of documentation, maybe from different sources, so that would not be a problem. Regarding the UI, it is a really good UI if you work on it, and the AI and APIs are excellent. I cannot say what improvement is needed, provided we also have good documentation online, which is good to understand.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for approximately three and a half years.

Regarding the stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I can give it a rating of nine or eight. I have never seen a downtime, and I do not think there are any glitches.

I would rate the scalability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a solid ten.

I would rate the technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) at least eight to nine. If I had to decide whether it is eight or nine, I would say eight.

Positive

The deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not really complex but depends on the hardware deployment. Sometimes there might be complications when you switch it on or when you place the right network cables. It depends on who is maintaining it. Once everything is up, then it is a pretty easy process, but the difficult part is manually installing it and placing it in the right tile with the right cables and networks.

With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I can give you an example of the return on investment. 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. It does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time. I think you can finish most of your work within four hours; even if you are doing a big upgrade, you can finish it in a smaller time span and do other work.

My advice for those looking to implement Dell PowerScale (Isilon) would be to first see what your requirement is. If you are in need of unstructured data or if you are in need of a NAS, and in NAS as well, if you need scale-out on a large enterprise level, you can go for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and it would not be a loss. I give this review an overall rating of eight.

My use cases for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) include large data lakes, video surveillance, and anywhere there is unstructured data. I would describe them as data mining, along with applications like Hadoop, where data mining was key before AI.

What I appreciate most about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is its scalability. I came from NetApp prior to that, where we marketed scale-out capabilities, but it really was not that. What it was, was a series of two-node clusters strung together without a common file system across compute nodes. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) actually combined a shared file system that scales seamlessly and works effectively, making the blocking and tackling exactly what was advertised.

Backward compatibility is something Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could work on. There are always technical challenges and firmware issues, especially once you get into the details of introducing current nodes into newer ones running different code.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for 11 years.

The stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is generally good. In the early days when I started with Isilon, there were customer satisfaction issues that were not product-based but rooted in misarchitected solutions due to incorrect pricing that misled the deployments.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has excellent scalability. I had customers in media and entertainment using it who would scale out to over 30 nodes, which is not common as many keep it down to four to six nodes due to risk mitigation.

I have contacted Dell PowerScale (Isilon) customer support in situations that were more misarchitected than product flaws. Once escalated, the company stood behind the product, swapping out nodes at no cost to the customer due to the impact on their business.

On a scale from one to ten for support, I would give Dell PowerScale (Isilon) at least a nine, considering the different ways to gain support through the portal.

Positive

I have used alternatives to Dell PowerScale (Isilon) such as NetApp, Nasuni, and IBM GPFS. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) outperforms them all.

From my point of view, the initial deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) was very easy because they did a good job of following common practices and provided great support and professional services. I think they could improve their handholding of customers after deployment by giving better guidance on what nodes do for the different workloads.

If a capable engineer was deploying Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for the first time, I would estimate it would take them approximately four hours, not including the rack mounting and physical labor, especially when professional services were on site while I guided the customer through the interface.

Whether one person is enough or a team is needed for the deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) depends on the aspect being addressed. If the planning phase is done upfront, I would say it is a one-person job, assuming meetings were held with the business units accessing the data.

Regarding the current pricing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I think it is competitive as they have moved into the SMB market very effectively. It is not just enterprise-based pricing, but something above retail and still competitively priced for the market they are targeting.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) definitely requires maintenance on my end, as the maintenance comes built-in with the product. Some try to extend the life using third-party maintenance, but I have seen that without a contract, especially after the five to seven-year mark, problems can arise.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) performs very well, and I still think they are a market leader. I recall they were a startup within a giant company, filling a necessary space in the portfolio.

In terms of my job, I have worked at various resellers or partners, including Insight and WWT, to sell and architect Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and had access to partner portals.

Overall, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a solid nine out of ten.

I have been a technical support engineer in Dell PowerScale (Isilon). If you raise a ticket to Dell support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it will come directly to us and we will work on that to help you resolve the issue. If you need any documentation or guidance to perform a configuration, we will help you with that. If you need any technical assistance, I will be helping you with that.

What I like the most about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that the storage capacity is very high. Compared to other cloud services for archiving purposes, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has been highly cost-efficient.

The downside of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that if we are replacing a drive, sometimes in the worst-case scenarios, some of the other drives will also go to the SmartFail state. That is the very worst thing for me in Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Additionally, even a battery replacement will make the particular node into a read-only state. It is not good for a use case. If we are using a three-node or four-node cluster, moving a particular node to read-only state just for a battery replacement is not good. That is my suggestion on Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

The initial deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit difficult. Deploying in the initial stages requires more effort. We need to engage some subject matter experts to deploy it. It is a bit of a lengthy process to deploy.

I have been using it in my career for three years.

We do not face any instability in Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The load balancers work well with this unstructured data storage, so up to 90 percent of the time, we will not face any downtime or instability in storage while accessing or writing in Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is highly scalable. There are no issues with that. As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.

I am the technical support engineer in Dell PowerScale (Isilon), so I am not going to contact any external support. I am the technical support engineer in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and I work for Dell as a vendor. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does require some maintenance on my end. In the initial configuration, it will not require much maintenance.

Positive

The initial deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit difficult. Deploying in the initial stages requires more effort. We need to engage some subject matter experts to deploy it. It is a bit of a lengthy process to deploy.

We need an on-site engineer, a networking engineer from the client team, a subject matter expert, and a technical support engineer. Around five to six members are required for an initial deployment.

I am not aware of the pricing in Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.

My main use case for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is storage. I use it for NAS storage. I can outline that there's no specific use case for the organization, as it's regular storage for all users.

I buy Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because of the price, service, and technology. The technology that is particularly good for my company is that I have two Dell PowerScale (Isilon) systems in two sites, and I use replication between them with Superna software, which is a third-party Dell technology.

Sometimes, it takes too long to set up everything. That's something I would want them to improve. The main challenge I face with it now is that my team is accustomed to using other vendors, and when I try to use Dell technology, it's difficult for them to use something new.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for seven years.

I would evaluate the customer service from Dell as pretty good. The Indian support is not cooperative, and we ask to move to European support.

Positive

The experience of pricing, licensing, and setup costs is good. I have an account manager, a good account manager that helped me with all the maintenance, other requirements, and troubleshooting problems.

I have seen return on investment already, and it's a good ROI.

The cost is competitive with other vendors such as HP. I always compare prices between two vendors, and they are good in this situation.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does not play a role in my organization's AI initiative. I have not supported features or aspects such as AI-driven data insight, automation, or advanced workloads; it's just storage. The size of my company is 10,000 users and approximately 1,000 servers. 

I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) eight out of ten.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is used as a NAS in our Media Asset Management system, which was the first one, and we have another that covers the graphics computing department, serving different departments, but the main idea is as production storage.

We use AI but primarily from cloud providers, as we don't utilize our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) on-premise storage for AI demands; when we have workloads using AI, we use AWS or other providers, while our main purpose for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is to manage video files for editing in our production system.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has powerful security, which makes it a very reliable storage solution for our content, and also the support and observability of our system; the call home feature is fantastic because when it presents an issue, Dell automatically opens a ticket regarding any warnings or alerts, allowing us to have a complete view of our system's health.

We have daily reports delivered by email regarding network performance and client actions, showing if our storage has presented some issues; fortunately, we don't have many performance issues since if something goes wrong, our customers contact us, and thankfully, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has never presented an issue in production, confirming its reliability.

We realized significant improvements by consolidating various silos that previously did not communicate well, drastically enhancing time and cost efficiency, although I cannot quantify a specific number at this moment.

Regarding areas for improvement in Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I currently cannot recall any particular feature needing enhancement since it has undergone many improvements over the past ten years, including advancements in file filters and extensions; if needed, I can check with my colleagues, but they do not seem to remember any points for now.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since 2017, having had two models; I started with the Isilon X410, and after that, I made a tech refresh with the All-Flash PowerScale H700 model, so it has been nine years I have been using it.

In terms of stability, I would rate it a nine out of ten since I have never experienced significant issues.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a scalable solution for our business, and I would rate its scalability similarly at eight out of ten due to its ease of scaling.

I would rate Dell's technical support an eight out of ten, reflecting my overall satisfaction.

Positive

The deployment was initially challenging due to a lack of familiarity with the product, but after the tech refresh two years ago, the subsequent implementation was much smoother, especially thanks to helpful technical and administrative training I received.

The first implementation took nearly three weeks to one month due to numerous discussions and technical configurations, as our biggest system has 28 nodes from Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

My role with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is as a technical supervisor, where I manage the system along with my team, which is responsible for a lot of access rules and the rights to access, and we do manage it accordingly.

I cannot provide a specific percentage for the return on investment from Dell PowerScale (Isilon); however, we realized significant improvements by consolidating various silos that previously did not communicate well, drastically enhancing time and cost efficiency, although I cannot quantify a specific number at this moment.

I find Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to be cost-efficient, as we use it today with APEX, with some specific volume contracted, and this approach has been beneficial for us, with costs aligning well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.

We have tried NetApp in a node storage context and Facilis TerraBlock, but neither was ideal for us; we also worked with legacy systems such as Avid ISIS; overall, we have established that Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is our primary choice due to validation from our Media Asset Management software, which preferred Dell for its features.

My advice for others considering Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is to ensure all requirements are met and to consult with the Dell team to address any potential issues; it is a trustworthy product without concerns, and understanding the configuration options is crucial since it offers various types, so discussing needs with a Dell specialist is beneficial.

I would recommend Dell PowerScale (Isilon) without hesitation.

To achieve a rating of ten, perhaps the pricing could see improvement, suggesting it might be that aspect of the offering that needs some adjustment. My overall review rating for this product is eight out of ten.

The use case for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is for most applications, including policy management, end user needs, file management, forensics extraction, analysis, smartphones, and media applications.

The benefit to our organization from using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that we can execute our jobs and activities effectively because we have the necessary capacity. With this latest technology, we can execute our activities in a better form.

The most helpful feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is the integration with ECS, now called ObjectScale, because we can implement Tier functionality. This allows us to move data between hot areas and cold storage areas, which is a very good resource for us.

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 interface.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for six months.

I find Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to be very stable and reliable. We have not had any problems in six months.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does grow with our business needs. We currently have Isilon, and with the purchase of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we can expand our environment significantly. It is very scalable.

I have not used customer service and support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) yet, but I don't anticipate that we will have any problems.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten. It is perfect.

We were looking at getting a solution in for storage. I have worked with storage before, and I have worked with parallel storage systems more than NAS appliances.

I have worked with Lustre, PowerScale, and NetApp as well. I would describe myself more as a user of NetApp and PowerScale. I work with customers who work with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

We are a consultancy firm, so we also partner with Dell and we deploy and deliver AI solutions, and Dell PowerScale (Isilon) sits underneath those. This makes it very important to our operations.

The top three valuable features for me are the redundancy, reliability, and mixed NFS and Samba share, SMB sharing.

We use a tool called IOR, which measures the IOPS and the throughput for very tailored and specific I/O scenarios. This allows you to test it under different conditions.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is brilliant for scalability and really, really good in that regard. They are adding new features all the time, which I have not used yet, but they are adding RDMA technology. This provides really low-latency connections between the clients and the machine itself, which is really good for AI-type workloads as well.

The product is feature rich.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for approximately ten years.

I have experience with others. No switching involved.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)  is very expensive compared to NetApp and compared to Nutanix as well.

The flash arrays, which are important for high-performance computing and AI initiatives, would be overpriced compared to some of their competitors.

Product support is great. There are definitely some challenges on deployment. Find a good partner to perform the deployment or be prepared to invest some time into the deployment. 

We primarily use Dell PowerScale for archive purposes. It functions as a large NAS.

One of the features we use in both PowerScale and Pure Storage is the snapshot feature. It's really important for us. 

Additionally, Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us.

Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash.

I have been working with PowerScale for six years.

It's probably very good. However, due to both cost and the knowledge required to maintain and use them, there are considerations about scalability.

Customer service is absolutely satisfying, rating at least nine out of ten, as they have managed previous issues well.

Positive

We do work with Dell and PowerScale, however, we are going to remove them, and as for now, it's going to be in 2026 since Pure Storage has a more cost-efficient model of storage use.

The initial setup requires extensive knowledge. I have to take very expensive courses just to set it up. It's not easy, taking maybe one or two weeks of learning before I should start to use it, which makes it costly.

I do believe that it delivered ROI, however, we see a better return of investment with other products we have considered.

Every time we purchase a PowerScale solution, we buy four nodes for one data center and four for another, with five years of maintenance covered by Dell. It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage.

We evaluated other options. Other solutions did not match our requirements, so we chose FlashArrayX instead of a new PowerMax since it was half the price.

If you know how to handle it, Dell PowerScale is a good product. However, Pure Storage offers similar or even better performance at a lower cost, so I rather recommend Pure Storage if you are looking for efficiency and cost benefits. 

Overall, I rate PowerScale an eight out of ten.