Dell PowerScale Reviews

We use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for SMB and NFS storage. Our specific use cases involve SMB file storage right now, as we've got a lot of migrating from old Solaris to a lot of Red Hat 8 environments, moving from our old Unities and all that to now utilizing Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for all of our SMB stuff.

What I appreciate best about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is the UI and the use of scripting that we can implement with it to automate a lot of our workloads. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has benefited our organization overall by helping a lot of our end users more than the actual IT group, and it has been awesome.

Since our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is our own on-prem in-house built system, we don't have many up-to-date resources, and we're still a few years behind. We don't use much of the PowerScale yet with AI, though we have plans to work towards that in the next month or two. I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

We have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since we installed it in January of this year, and we've had it up and running, using it mostly for production stuff, for about two or three months now.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect, as we haven't had any hiccups with it so far.

There are no specific scalability issues at this time.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as great. We've sent out emails at 6:00 in the morning and received replies at 7:15. We've been working with the same team for at least as long as I've been there, which is about two years, and this consistency has been awesome. If I had to rate them from one to ten, with ten being the best, I would definitely give them a ten.

Before adopting Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we were using a few old Unispheres, Unities, and PowerStore. Most of those were all end of life, which is why we made the change.

My experience when deploying Dell PowerScale (Isilon) was very straightforward, as we had Dell come on site to do all the actual setup, which was a big help.

The deployment took about a week and a half with a person on site getting everything ready.

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.

I don't have too much experience with the pricing, setup cost, or licensing. As a partner of Dell for a long time, Dell did help us a lot with the pricing.

We did consider other solutions before going with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), looking at PowerFlex within Dell itself, and I'm sure we'll move that in the next year or two, but we were pretty focused on Dell PowerScale (Isilon). We chose Dell PowerScale (Isilon) over PowerFlex because we didn't think we needed all of the usability that PowerFlex provides; we were more centered on just SMB and NFS storage for now.

If someone from another organization asked for my opinion on employing Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for themselves, I would say if they're working towards file storage, then definitely look into it. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being best and ten being worse, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a nine.

Dell PowerScale's primary use case for our organization is server virtualization.

I would describe the overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale as satisfactory given our current testing phase. We purchased the entry-level model, so the speed is not optimal, but we do not require high speed, which is acceptable for our needs. Regarding efficiency, we have not yet started the service. We will begin our main service one month later, so I am unable to evaluate the other functions at this time. We have not yet conducted measurements on these capabilities.

I believe the support engineers need to improve their skills. In our case, the engineer provides adequate hardware support, but they lack expertise in supporting Dell PowerScale's API and Kubernetes-related APIs such as CSI API. Although Dell PowerScale can support Kubernetes API, our engineer does not possess the necessary knowledge in this area.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale for only one or two months since we purchased it two or three months ago. We acquired Dell PowerStore one month prior to that. The timeframe has been too short to fully evaluate the solution.

Dell PowerScale has demonstrated scalability, with our company having more than 30,000 people testing it.

I would rate Dell technical support as normal and not problematic. As I work in Korea, the server and related support is excellent, but the storage support is somewhat inconsistent.

On a scale from one to ten, I evaluate Dell technical support as six or seven.

I believe the product itself is adequate, but the Korean support engineer needs to improve their skills.

Before Dell PowerScale, we had already used Dell servers, but this is the first time our company has implemented storage from Dell.

The initial setup was easy because we received support from their partners, which enabled us to install it without difficulty.

We require approximately 50 administrators for this implementation.

To measure the effectiveness of Dell PowerScale, before we purchased the product, our requirement was efficiency of at least three times. We did not have many additional requirements beyond this efficiency goal and the project schedule and delivery timeline.

Regarding the price of Dell PowerScale, I consider it a budget storage solution.

We purchased Dell PowerScale from their partner. I provide this review with a rating of six out of ten.

Our healthcare storage needs require us to store off several radiology images and use the data since November 2018.

The product has helped my organization by managing large data sets.

The most valuable feature for me is SyncIQ. The reason I find it valuable is its data resilience. 

There's nothing really I'd improve about the product. We're currently expanding it, so we're going to our next generation of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since we've had it since 2018. We're consolidating as drive sizes have gone bigger, and we're consolidating the footprint down. That's what we're currently doing.

We have had the solution since 2018.

I find the product to be resilient and stable. There's no downtime and no crashes; over the years, we have experienced some issues, yet nothing major. The key components are the helper cloud pools and S3 IAQ.

My organization is quite large, with about 30,000 employees.

The growth has been substantial in areas such as radiology and genomics. One of the best features we've utilized recently is offload to cloud pools due to capacity constraints on-premise. We didn't want to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) straight away, so we utilized cloud pools to offload some data to Azure. 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.

Customer service has been really good. 

Positive

Before Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we were using standard Windows SMB back in 2018. The data had grown so much within six, seven years. It was just standard Windows SMB.

I have not compared it to other products in terms of deployment. I have been part of the deployment of the product. It's very straightforward. there were no issues in implementing it.

The solution is expensive. It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate the product overall about eight.

Dell PowerScale has been in use for approximately four months. Our main use case for Dell PowerScale is for AI, as we have several projects, and we really appreciate the availability, the data availability, and the power management.

Our AI project is about helping university staff work better, and Dell PowerScale offers very good data availability for the needs of our students and teachers.

Dell PowerScale plays a role in our organization's AI initiatives as it helped with automation and great data availability.

The best features Dell PowerScale offers in my experience are the availability and the storage management.

I appreciate the storage management because I can always manage the storage, and I can manage it better than other products.

Dell PowerScale has positively impacted my organization as the students and the teachers are much happier using our services. They used to complain about some availability of our servers, but now it is not a problem anymore.

We have measured fewer complaints and faster access to data.

I am very satisfied with the product at this time and do not see areas needing improvement.

I have been working in my current field for four years.

Dell PowerScale is stable.

Dell PowerScale's scalability is good.

The customer support is great.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Dell PowerScale integrates very well with our existing IT infrastructure for operational efficiency, and it had no problem integrating.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was fine, as the pricing was acceptable.

I have seen a return on investment in terms of time saved and fewer complaints, but we cannot really measure the money saved being a university.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Dell PowerScale.

I would rate Dell PowerScale a 10 out of 10. I chose this rating because it is the best product I have ever used.

The performance metrics I use to measure success with Dell PowerScale include fewer complaints from teachers and students.

I would describe the overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale as very easy to use, and I had no problems.

My advice for others looking into using Dell PowerScale is not to be held back by anything, as it is a very good product. Overall, I would give this product a rating of 10.

Our use cases involve sheer storage, as it's about 4 petabytes of storage that we use for our genetics team for storing big data.

The capacity and scalability are what I appreciate the most about it; that was huge for us. We saw its benefits immediately after we started using it.

We're still fairly new with it. It's been a pretty positive experience thus far. However, they could improve implementation, as we had to rack and stack it ourselves.

We have been using the product for less than three months, as we just got it.

The stability has been excellent thus far, with no issues.

The scalability is excellent.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has features that cater to the needs of medium-sized organizations. It's a pretty configurable product. We're running with about 4 petabytes, which is a massive amount of data, but I know you can run it with much less. 

I see Dell products growing with our future needs. Our company has about 400 people working. 

The technical support has been excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten for support.

Positive

We were using NetApp previously. We haven't used Dell PowerScale (Isilon) long enough to give a full comparison at this point, but they both seem to be pretty comparable products.

The initial deployment was fairly easy. It took two of our guys, but it would have been nice to have a white glove service so they would rack it, and we could have just configured it. Overall, it took less than a day.

It requires very little maintenance on our end.

Two people were required for this type of job overall.

The pricing is excellent.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does not play a role in our organization's AI initiatives at this time. 

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

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. 

Our company's use case for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is unstructured data as it's our general file share for everything.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) benefits my organization by making it easier to connect and work on files. It's also been a great solution for storing our larger modalities and all the pictures and images from that, along with the videos, since we are a healthcare organization. It's been a good use.

The accessibility and the configurability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is really nice and it expands well. 

The reliability and stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is good, with no downtime. 

If I could improve one thing on Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it would be better object storage as it recently breached into S3, and that capability could be broadened. They won't do it as they have ObjectScale, however, the capabilities on Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could be improved.

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

I haven't had any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) recently, however, we have experienced them in the past; however, it has been a long time. I don't know that any downtimes were a hardware issue with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

We utilize 70,000 terabytes on Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Generally, when we put in a ticket on something regarding Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it takes a while to get to the right person as we wade through first-level support. 

Once we reach the second level person or the right level, the support is great and awesome.

I would rate the support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as probably an eight.

We switched from NetApp before I joined my team, and while we were using Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we merged with other organizations that were using different solutions and sunset those uses into Dell PowerScale (Isilon). They were using Pure Storage in some other places.

I would describe my experience deploying Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as easy. 

It's a very quick, seamless product, and once we get it in, it's just a matter of setting up some policies to copy data over, whether for an LCR or standing up a completely fresh new one. 

With Dell support always there to help, it remains pretty straightforward since the software is intuitive.

Maintenance and upgrades for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are also pretty straightforward; sometimes they're a little slow due to the size of our cluster, however, overall, the support is good and maintenance is easy. 

Certainly, we have seen return on investment and peace of mind, especially with our two clusters that are linked together, where one is a disaster recovery solution for the other. We get a lot of peace of mind from that, and it's worth every penny.

The second cluster of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) gives us flexibility for small things like code upgrades, all the way to scenarios where we have lost this data center or data, allowing us to check if data is still intact on the other side; we can flip easily.

I don't get involved in the pricing, TCO costs, and licensing of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since I'm more involved in engineering what we need, so the prices are hammered out elsewhere.

We haven't considered any other solutions besides Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

My role using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) involves overseeing the hardware and the software, and managing some of the permissions and access to the data on the array. 

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

I work with Dell PowerScale as a customer and technical architect. I have been working with Dell PowerScale since around 2020 to 2021.

Dell PowerScale offers several advantages, particularly regarding AI-driven data insights, automation, and advanced workloads. The AI features support these aspects effectively. The primary benefit from AI is enhanced data intelligence and operational efficiency.

Dell PowerScale has covered many advantages as a product. However, there are disadvantages that could be improved.

I have used the solution for around 2020 to 2021.

From my personal experience, Dell PowerScale is a highly stable product with no significant glitches or latency issues.

Dell PowerScale is a highly scalable product without notable limitations on scalability.

I would rate the support at nine points on a scale from zero to ten points, with ten being the best.

I have not worked with similar tools from other vendors for comparison to Dell PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale provides return on investment in terms of value for money.

Dell PowerScale is quite affordable in terms of pricing.

Dell PowerScale is designed for enterprise customers and includes features for small and medium businesses.

Our primary use case for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it's the central storage platform for the whole university.

One of the most valuable features I find in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is the scalability, as you can extend, extend, extend over time without having to move the file system. 

Also, the separation between different access zones is a tenant system that really allows me to completely separate data streams, ensuring that one group of tenants is not allowed to touch or see any of the other tenants' data.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve in terms of having some problems with using IPv6 and IPv4 on the same namespace at the same time, which is one of our biggest problems as you have to do some really bad workarounds to get that working.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for around about 17 years.

A specific example of where Dell PowerScale (Isilon) made a noticeable improvement or impact on my business operations is that we had a performance impact for around about one week in the whole 17 years, which wasn't really downtime.

The benefit I have realized from using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is first of all the scalability; we started on PowerScale with around about 300 terabytes and are now two and a half petabytes, still on the same file system.

I would evaluate Dell's support as mostly outstanding because, at least for me, I always find a way to find someone who has enough experience to help me with my problem. For easy problems, I have been through several times, but for complicated problems, I will find someone who can truly help me.

Positive

Prior to adopting Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I was using another solution called Isilon, and I had the first Isilon outside of the labs ever delivered to the customer.

My experience with deploying Dell PowerScale (Isilon) spans 17 years, and I think I have faced every type of problem. In every situation, I have found someone who could help me come out of the situation before anybody would recognize that there was a problem.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has features that specifically cater to my needs, such as the separation between different access zones. It's a tenant system that really allows me to completely separate data streams to have legal aspects realized, ensuring that one group of tenants are not allowed to touch or see any of the other tenants' data.

I have realized a return on my investment with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). It's worth the money because of the total cost where you only pay one person to run the whole environment instead of paying 15 people to run the same on cheap hardware.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) shows it's a premium platform, so it's a big amount of money. Not too many universities in Germany are willing to spend, but I'm a one-man shop, so I'm driving and running the whole platform, which is much cheaper compared to a cheap platform where you need many people to operate it.

Before choosing Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I considered different vendors like NetApp and others as competitors. They had their advantages, but the overall package was better suited for our requests with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), so that was the reason for our choice.

My advice to other companies considering Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it takes a little time to understand the product, but once you have it set up and running, it will run stable for all its lifetime. I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a nine out of ten.

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.