Senior Manager, Information Security & Infrastructure at National Football League
Real User
Top 10
Nov 12, 2025
As for my experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we have had Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for a while now, so we are basically on the renewal track all the time. We did not find it to be overly cost prohibitive when we first acquired it, and the licensing continues to be acceptable.
It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wants something inexpensive, there's PowerVault. The system is marketed for mid-range to high-end pricing.
Storage Architect at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
May 20, 2025
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.
Senior System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
May 19, 2025
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.
Storage & Data Protection Specialist at General Dynamics Land Systems
Real User
Top 20
May 19, 2025
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.
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.
While customers often perceive it as expensive, I find that considering its functions and performance, Dell PowerScale is reasonably priced. I would rate it as a five out of ten in terms of costliness. In addition to the standard licensing fee, there are extra costs for services and additional solutions with Dell PowerScale. Services like maintenance and support may incur charges. Sub-solutions such as CloudIQ are also additional and may be charged based on usage or quota.
It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements. They do not have an option if a customer wants to purchase 20 TB storage space.
Sr. Storage & Backup Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 18, 2022
We have a five-year contract with Dell. We get new hardware each time we renew the contract and the cost is calculated on a percentage-wise and scalability basis. Every five years, we replace the tech nodes.
High-Performance Computing Services Manager at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited
Real User
Jan 26, 2022
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. The licensing model is interesting, because it is essentially “pay to unlock”. Most of the available features are software-defined, so they are already available in OneFS, the underlying Operating System, waiting for you to activate them as needed. There are a few additional costs, however. NDMP backups require you to install fibre cards, which are sold separately. Then of course you have the cost of tape and off-site storage, but you would have those same costs with most other platforms. Luckily, we do not need to back-up the whole cluster because we can rely on cluster replication and snapshots (on both source and target clusters) to achieve our RPOs. But we do have a legal requirement to preserve some data for an extended period, so we use tape for that.
Geo-computing Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Dec 16, 2021
One of the reasons we chose this on-premises solution is that it's a known cost. In our case, lifting to a cloud-based solution was an unknown cost and in the current environment of tight budgets, having a known cost is a huge benefit. We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it.
CIO at a educational organization with 201-500 employees
Real User
Nov 30, 2021
Since I have to manage all the budgets, 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. Like anything else, it could always be less expensive. That would be great. At the same time, I would like to make sure that they keep innovating.
Network Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Dec 30, 2020
We're at the A200 version, which is more for online archiving. It's storage-based, but they're called archive nodes. They're all SATA spinning disks. If you need a lot of storage at a cheap, economical price, and really high-speed, if you're not doing transactional stuff, they have these archive nodes. The PowerScale A200 is more like an online archival system where the nodes are there but you're actively addressing them. It stores them on spinning disk so you get tons of storage for a good price.
The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features. We went for the traditional NFS and CIFS platform. We have also licensed the HDFS platform because we want to do something with the HDFS. There are some new features, but we are not using all the features because you need licensing for all them. However, we are seeing that the platform is growing. At the end of the day, when we will need some more features, we will license some more of those features, knowing that they will have them. The F600 machine of PowerScale is much better than what we have. It has MDM drives and 100 GB connection with the same software. I know that you can license also some enterprise class features on the platform, but we are not using those features today.
Information Systems Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Oct 29, 2020
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. It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems. I do think it's worth the value, but it's definitely not cheap.
The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management. We added on a deduplication license. That is the only thing that we have added. That was a decision where it was cheaper for us to license the deduplication than it was to buy more storage, so we went with that approach. We just did an analysis and found this was the case. We haven't really hit a workload or situation that we have had any issues catering for. Certainly with the huge number of different node types now, we could position any sort of performance from very cheap, deep archive through to high performance, random workloads. I feel like we could respond very quickly to any business requirement that came up assuming they had budget. Even if we didn't have budget, largely with the way our clusters are configured, we typically mix in high and low performance. We won't buy top of the line, high performance, but we will buy basic H500 nodes, which are a large amount of self-spinning disks. That is what we standardize for our high performance tier.
It's one of those situations where you have to find the right price for you. When we talked to the reseller, we were able to negotiate the right price for what we needed.
Dell PowerScale leads in unstructured data management with unified file and object storage, massive scalability, security, and cloud adaptability, enhancing AI, analytics, and enterprise applications with exceptional performance and resilience.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...
As for my experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we have had Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for a while now, so we are basically on the renewal track all the time. We did not find it to be overly cost prohibitive when we first acquired it, and the licensing continues to be acceptable.
The cost is competitive with other vendors such as HP. I always compare prices between two vendors, and they are good in this situation.
It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wants something inexpensive, there's PowerVault. The system is marketed for mid-range to high-end pricing.
We have to go through a certified reseller for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). From a value standpoint, it performs very well.
The solution is expensive. It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
The cost of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is important, but we have public projects that allow us to apply for funding to update our infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The pricing of Dell solutions is higher than that of Huawei.
The pricing of Dell PowerScale is reasonable. However, it is on the pricier side. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.
The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements.
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.
The product cost is affordable. It was not very high and not too cheap.
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.
IBM is cheaper than Dell PowerScale.
Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo.
While customers often perceive it as expensive, I find that considering its functions and performance, Dell PowerScale is reasonably priced. I would rate it as a five out of ten in terms of costliness. In addition to the standard licensing fee, there are extra costs for services and additional solutions with Dell PowerScale. Services like maintenance and support may incur charges. Sub-solutions such as CloudIQ are also additional and may be charged based on usage or quota.
It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements. They do not have an option if a customer wants to purchase 20 TB storage space.
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution.
It is an expensive solution. They should include technical support services with their contract.
The price of the solution is high.
The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better.
We have a five-year contract with Dell. We get new hardware each time we renew the contract and the cost is calculated on a percentage-wise and scalability basis. Every five years, we replace the tech nodes.
The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable.
Pricing for this solution is reasonable.
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. The licensing model is interesting, because it is essentially “pay to unlock”. Most of the available features are software-defined, so they are already available in OneFS, the underlying Operating System, waiting for you to activate them as needed. There are a few additional costs, however. NDMP backups require you to install fibre cards, which are sold separately. Then of course you have the cost of tape and off-site storage, but you would have those same costs with most other platforms. Luckily, we do not need to back-up the whole cluster because we can rely on cluster replication and snapshots (on both source and target clusters) to achieve our RPOs. But we do have a legal requirement to preserve some data for an extended period, so we use tape for that.
One of the reasons we chose this on-premises solution is that it's a known cost. In our case, lifting to a cloud-based solution was an unknown cost and in the current environment of tight budgets, having a known cost is a huge benefit. We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it.
Since I have to manage all the budgets, 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. Like anything else, it could always be less expensive. That would be great. At the same time, I would like to make sure that they keep innovating.
We're at the A200 version, which is more for online archiving. It's storage-based, but they're called archive nodes. They're all SATA spinning disks. If you need a lot of storage at a cheap, economical price, and really high-speed, if you're not doing transactional stuff, they have these archive nodes. The PowerScale A200 is more like an online archival system where the nodes are there but you're actively addressing them. It stores them on spinning disk so you get tons of storage for a good price.
The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features. We went for the traditional NFS and CIFS platform. We have also licensed the HDFS platform because we want to do something with the HDFS. There are some new features, but we are not using all the features because you need licensing for all them. However, we are seeing that the platform is growing. At the end of the day, when we will need some more features, we will license some more of those features, knowing that they will have them. The F600 machine of PowerScale is much better than what we have. It has MDM drives and 100 GB connection with the same software. I know that you can license also some enterprise class features on the platform, but we are not using those features today.
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. It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems. I do think it's worth the value, but it's definitely not cheap.
The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management. We added on a deduplication license. That is the only thing that we have added. That was a decision where it was cheaper for us to license the deduplication than it was to buy more storage, so we went with that approach. We just did an analysis and found this was the case. We haven't really hit a workload or situation that we have had any issues catering for. Certainly with the huge number of different node types now, we could position any sort of performance from very cheap, deep archive through to high performance, random workloads. I feel like we could respond very quickly to any business requirement that came up assuming they had budget. Even if we didn't have budget, largely with the way our clusters are configured, we typically mix in high and low performance. We won't buy top of the line, high performance, but we will buy basic H500 nodes, which are a large amount of self-spinning disks. That is what we standardize for our high performance tier.
It's one of those situations where you have to find the right price for you. When we talked to the reseller, we were able to negotiate the right price for what we needed.
While the initial setup isn't too expensive, it can end up being expensive depending on how many machines you have or how big you are.