Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

We use Dell PowerScale to share data between our Windows, Linux, and Azure systems.

Before Dell PowerScale, we had safe clusters for Linux systems and Windows file servers with separate item storage. Now, we have centralized storage together.

If we have an AI extension, data can be reordered from unstructured to structured. Scientists travel with a lot of data and ask to put the data in storage and forget about it. So there is a lot of unused data left in the storage.

PowerScale is flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. It includes a lot of security snapshots so if a user accidentally deletes data, we can provide the snapshot for them to restore their lost data.

PowerScale helps reduce our organizational risk. We have additional security running on PowerScale for added protection. Before PowerScale, we had no security.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale is its scalability. If we need more storage, we can add more nodes without the need to install anything else. Also, the data compression and deduplication are valuable. The SFA recovery site sync is good.

We believed that we could share all the data between Windows RTS and Linux RTS but that is not true because we can break the RTS as a system so we must separate the data. This means we have one system but we still have two data paths.

PowerScale is not suitable for virtual environments. So we use a different solution for our hybrid environments like our VMware clusters. 

I have been using Dell PowerScale for one year.

Dell PowerScale is stable.

Dell PowerScale is easily scalable.

We are supposed to have technical support from Europe, but until now we have only received support from India.

We previously used Pure Storage. We wanted PowerStore but our other partner offered us PowerScale faster.

We ran into an issue deploying PowerScale F900 because of some bugs but with the support, it worked out. 

We used a reseller for the implementation. T-Systems from Telecom. Their engineer installed the wrong cable that was not hard enough and we had to break down the switch to replace it. 

PowerScale hardware is expensive but it consumes less energy making it more efficient. In five years we will see a return on investment compared to other solutions.

I would rate Dell PowerScale eight out of ten. We have scalability and one file system for most use cases but the GUI is terrible. If we are searching for a file we must know the full path. Also, the alerts are not clear enough. 

Our customers consist of banking sectors, financial sectors, infrastructure services, and service divisions, such as oil and gas-based customers. We recommend Dell PowerScale to our customers based on their business demands and data management needs. Primarily, it is used for handling large-scale data, including real-time data generation from remote locations, particularly in industries like automobile manufacturing, where vast amounts of unstructured data are gathered and processed.

Dell PowerScale helps our customers by providing a highly scalable and efficient data management solution that supports their operations effectively. It allows for the seamless addition of nodes to the cluster as needed, ensuring the organization's data storage can grow proportionately with their demands. PowerScale supports various use cases, from real-time data processing to maintaining data integrity and availability, which is crucial for sectors generating large volumes of data daily.

One of the most valuable features is erasure coding, which prevents data loss even if a single node fails. The OneFS OS provides a single namespace, improving data storage efficiency and management. 

Features like ransomware protection, file lock retention, and third-party integrations (e.g., Superna for ransomware protection) are significant benefits. 

Additionally, the scalability and capability to handle large amounts of unstructured data, real-time data processing, and integration with AI workloads make it a robust solution for enterprises.

Improvements could be made on the object storage side. PowerScale offers object storage capabilities, but not in a fully integrated way. If customers have workloads requiring both file and object storage, PowerScale can provide up to 20% object storage, which might not be sufficient for all needs. A unified solution combining NAS and object storage, similar to other solutions that combine block and NAS, would be beneficial.

I have worked with Dell PowerScale for almost a year. Previously, I worked with the Isilon model before transitioning to PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale is very stable, with a stability rating of nine out of ten. In terms of availability and stability, I would give it a ten.

Dell PowerScale is extremely scalable. You can start with a minimum of three nodes and expand based on capacity demands. This feature allows for significant flexibility in managing storage needs. The scalability is further enhanced by its ability to integrate new nodes automatically without manual effort.

Support for Dell PowerScale is never a challenge. There is twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five support available, including four-hour on-site support for high-priority issues. The on-site engineer will reach the location, review the issue, and work on it within four hours. Hence, I would rate technical support a ten.

Positive

The initial setup for PowerScale is straightforward and easy. It just requires initial configuration, followed by automated processes to complete the setup. Therefore, I would give it a rating of ten for ease of setup.

The price of Dell PowerScale depends on the customer's specific requirements and capacity needs. It is generally considered a costly solution, but its features and capabilities justify the price. It's essential to align the pricing with the business needs and future scalability requirements.

If your business demands a highly scalable data solution, including handling multiple edge locations and large amounts of data effectively, Dell PowerScale is a suitable option. It is particularly advantageous for enterprises with specific AI workloads. However, due to its cost, it may not be the best option for mid-range customers or those looking for general-purpose file services.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We primarily use Dell PowerScale for storage in our data management operations.

Dell PowerScale has provided us with a single space of storage, which is beneficial for our needs.

The most valuable feature is its single space of storage.

The analytics could be improved.

I have about fifteen years of experience with this solution under different names.

The stability of Dell PowerScale is very good.

The scalability of this solution is good. I would rate it ten on a scale from one to ten.

The technical support is excellent. I would rate it ten on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We used Quantum before switching to Dell. Quantum was not as reliable as we wanted, and it was more difficult to use.

The initial setup was easy. I would rate it ten on a scale from one to ten.

Our deployment was done in-house.

There has been no massive ROI in the storage. That said, it met our expectations.

The pricing of Dell PowerScale is reasonable. However, it is on the pricier side. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

Check out what's on the market and make sure it's right for you. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the solution to store camera video surveillance and hospital X-rays.

The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and ease of implementation.

It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program.

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

The solution's stability is really good, and I haven't had a crash for two years. The solution works just fine even if a node goes down.

The solution's scalability is very good, and you can easily scale it.

Sometimes, the support team throws me around before I talk to the right person. However, the situation has been much better for the past year.

Positive

Our customers previously used NetApp. They switched to Dell PowerScale because it was easy to use. In my opinion, Dell PowerScale is better than NetApp because it's faster and more hybrid.

The solution's initial setup is easy for me because it's been the same implementation from the beginning. However, it's not so easy when the customers do it themselves.

The solution reduces our customers' power consumption by around 30% and saves them rack space.

The solution's ability to interface with AI models and algorithms is very good.

The solution has been really good for helping our organization manage and run our storage from any location.

The solution has helped to reduce or eliminate data silos, which has enabled our customers to add new nodes by themselves.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected has been really good.

I've deployed Dell PowerScale for 300 terabytes to about 800 terabytes sized environments.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

I've worked on multiple cases, like cache, performance, and application cases.

Dell PowerScale has the SmartConnect and SmartConnect Pro features. That's why I like the product.

Dell is an expansive product. Everyone has a Dell product.

The improvement should be in AI. Everything is going towards AI. If they improved the AI features, it would be easier for customers to handle.

If some customers have expired products and cannot renew them, Dell should provide knowledge-based articles to help them handle issues like replication, node issues, or hardware issues. They have storage admin engineers who can handle it.

AI could also help with things like searching.  For example, if I want Anil's profile, I should be able to see everything on the screen. AI could also help with common issues like performance issues. If you type "performance issues" into their portal, it should tell you what needs to be checked, what shouldn't be checked, and where to check it, whether the issue is from the storage end, the host end, or the switch end.

Dell can improve in terms of support. Dell hires freshers who don't have much experience. They should resolve issues faster. At Accenture, we reach out to customers within 15 minutes if they have any issues.

I worked with it for five years. In 2019, Isilon was changed to PowerScale.

Scalability is very good in terms of Dell products.

The tech support is good.

Neutral

It requires more manpower for the installation. More than two people are needed for the process. 

It takes around four hours for a full deployment. It is easy to integrate with other systems.

It will require some maintenance. It depends on the hardware.

Users can save time and money with PowerScale. There is around 15% to 20% time savings.

Dell products are expensive. They are more expensive than other competitors.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. If you have a small environment, I can recommend Isilon PowerScale.

I would recommend it to others because Dell is a very good company, and we can blindly trust Dell products. It's number five, I think, or six in a global ranking.

We had to move metadata from standard disks to SSDs because we had issues with how the cluster handled metadata operations. With a lot of IO, the data lookup wasn't fast enough, causing performance problems. This setup resolved those issues.

We no longer had the performance issues with Dell PowerScale. 

The platform performs really well. We're a media company with 14 TV stations. This solution is very capable of meeting our demands well. We use the SMB protocol for storage access, and it performs really well. 

The best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much;  we usually upgrade once a year.

We can get more than gigabit throughput from it. 

The disk failure handling could be better. We had a few issues because one disk failed, which slightly impacted the whole node, but overall, the performance is stable.

We had to expand and increase the storage capacity, but it turned out we needed a totally new cluster because we couldn't expand the current one due to software incompatibilities. We think the backend network should be upgraded from InfiniBand to Ethernet networking, and we had to buy a new cluster. Dell has significantly increased the prices of new nodes, by a lot. As a result, we're considering new vendors because if prices increase by 300%, then the clients will look elsewhere.

The disc server handling is not the best. Maybe the tiering logic could be improved. It's based on our age or some other logic but not on disk usage. If you have a tier one, you don’t want to load it completely; it deserves some free space for new data, and you can’t manage that with the current tiering logic. That’s where this software or this solution could be improved.

I have been using it for six years. 

PowerScale, which used to be known as Isilon, was developed by EMC before EMC became part of Dell.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten because the new nodes are not compatible with the overall brand. So, we don’t have the option to scale an old cluster. This is a limitation because I could increase the node numbers with the same version, and then it works seamlessly. However, maintaining different versions is not the best solution.

We had some issues with level 1 support. We had to fight with them on repeated issues. 

We asked them if they could escalate the support to a higher level. There is room for improvement in level 1 support. 

Neutral

I used an IBM storage solution with an IBM GPFS file system and Samba.

We switched to Dell because of performance issues we had with this setup, which were caused primarily by the Samba NAS solution. IBM now offers licensing for commercial SMB protocol implementation, and they are capable of providing a good solution for us.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy to set up. 

The deployment process took a couple of days. It’s an on-premise solution.

We had to integrate it with our Active Directory system, and we had to implement some additional schemas, but apart from that, it was a standard process.

It is a really expensive solution. I would rate the pricing a nine out of ten, with one being low price and ten being high price. 

From a technical point of view, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I would recommend using it. However, it's important to consider the high price point. Evaluate if you can get the same feature set from other vendors at a lower cost.

The solution's scalability is very good.

The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved. If you have a lot of nodes, for example, 15 nodes, and when you say you lost one node on the paper, the performance is not affected. However, if you have so much file count and fifteen nodes, losing one node really affects the performance. One of our customers had this issue.

Also, when you lose a couple of drives, it's a different structure, then you can lose data. It is clearer on the NetApp side, and you can create a rate group and a pool. So you will have more redundancy on the drives. For example, in a rate set for around 100 drives, you can lose around 20 drives, which depends on the configuration.

In NetApp, we will not lose data, but if you lose 20 drives in EMC, you will also lose data. Small systems like Dell PowerScale (Isilon) work perfectly with five, six, or ten nodes. Based on my experience, if you have 15 nodes in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and lose one node, it creates some problems.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for more than ten years.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a seven out of ten for stability. The solution's stability should be improved, especially for more than ten nodes.

If the customer doesn't need more performance, you should be able to adjust the solution to expand just the capacity and not the performance.

We recommend Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to customers who request low capacity but high performance. Each node in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has limited capacity, and we need to add more nodes, but we can get more performance. Adding more controllers to NetApp to expand the system and scale up reduces its price and performance.

For example, if the customer needs 200 terabytes of capacity with high performance and high throughput, we use Dell PowerScale (Isilon). If they need performance and capacity, then NetApp's price and performance are really good compared to Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy to implement.

NetApp's implementation, configuration, and integrations are easier than Dell PowerScale (Isilon). For Dell PowerScale (Isilon), you need to use the command prompt for some configurations and integrations; you cannot configure everything on the user interface.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution.

Users who want performance and have a budget can prefer Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

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

We use Dell PowerScale for SMB-based storage and NFS-based storage.

Dell PowerScale allows us to consolidate multiple storage units into a single storage unit.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance.

The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved.

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

I rate Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Dell PowerScale an eight out of ten for scalability.

We previously used NetApp. We switched to Dell PowerScale because NetApp's support was expensive, and we were looking for something more powerful and flexible. Dell PowerScale is the solution that meets our needs.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution's performance allowed us to shrink our workflow by about two times. We are a media and payment business. A lot of our workflows are video-based, and we store backups to a second system. With Dell PowerScale, we already see performance increases by almost twofold.

Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo.

Before choosing Dell PowerScale, we evaluated Qumulo and a new version of NetApp.

I suggest users talk to someone who has actually used Dell PowerScale and has experience with it. Dell PowerScale has a more integrated interface. Compared to the interfaces of the newer generations of storage like Qumulo, Dell PowerScale has a comparatively older-looking interface. Apart from that, the solution is fine.

Overall, I rate Dell PowerScale an eight out of ten.