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, it comes with many options. Based on customer needs and workload demands, I can customize the hardware configuration to meet the customer's budget in some way or another.
Product Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
Oct 22, 2026
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we have Volkswagen level agreements with Dell, which show better pricing compared to NetApp and Hitachi. However, we have a problem with the validity of their quotes, as they change the quotes even when we act on them within the valid time, which is not good.
Chief Consultant at a wholesaler/distributor with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Top 10
Oct 20, 2026
The challenge right now in managing enterprise data is the market, the cost, the memory prices, and the drive prices. This is something that is very difficult for customers. However, they have also been looking at Apex from Dell to help alleviate some of those issues and provide more predictable costs. Dell has put forward a proposal that they are considering. Besides the current market regarding Dell PowerScale, I think the pricing is reasonable. However, currently it is not, but that is just a cycle. Dell has some solutions to help alleviate those issues, like Apex, and I think it is really good that they are able to do something like that to help customers.
Senior Engineer at Continental Engineering Services
Real User
Top 5
Sep 29, 2026
I think the price is reasonable. We procured this during the time of COVID, around 2022, and the price was very competitive. If you are looking for technology, there will also be a price associated with it. Everything will be right if you look for good technology, good service, and good hardware capability, then you have to pay for that. There is not much difference price-wise. However, at the current scenario due to the shortage of chips and memory, the price is quite expensive now, but that is understandable. The license model is a bit expensive because every year you need to renew the license. This may discourage some customers from paying the license cost. If you go with the enterprise version, it is user-friendly and you will get many additional features. If you do not go with the license version, then you will miss out on a few advantages of Dell PowerScale that you could get with the license version.
The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level of comparison. Although in the current markets we have seen the price difference, it is economical compared to the public cloud.We did some ROI analysis in comparison to some other technology and with the public cloud as well. In that way, Dell PowerScale is very cost-effective. That could be the reason why we have chosen Dell PowerScale over other products.
In terms of pricing, I find it to be good, though not the best, as there are other products with better pricing than Dell PowerScale. However, it is value for money, and I feel satisfied with it.
Senior Manager, Engineering, Oem Solutions at BCDVideo
Real User
Top 20
May 20, 2026
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisioning experience has been pleasant. Typically you have kickoff meetings and there are different teams that are engaged with myself and with other teams within my organization. That is a pleasant experience. It is sort of almost a white-glove experience, at least the way we order and provision these for our customers. The provisioning experience is very pleasant. However, pricing methodology is a difficult hurdle for us to sell to our customers.
System Engineer at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
May 20, 2026
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing is minimal. I have set up a few nodes in my time, but it has always been very easy. I do not have the actual pricing or anything, as I have not deployed nodes and been involved in the pricing structure.
Manager, Information Technology at a educational organization with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 20
May 19, 2026
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale is that pricing is very competitive. We are actually about to move to the APEX Flex option. Dell handles all setup, so I do not have to deal with any of it.
Senior System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
Feb 17, 2026
As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government entity, the country policy does not allow direct purchases; it goes through a formal RFP process. We prepared an RFP, and the bidders and vendors participated in the bidding process. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled the requirement and was the most cost-effective option. This is how we made our selection.
Regarding pricing, Isilon can be cost-efficient; if you are using more capacity nodes without needing more performance, it won't affect your budget much. However, multiple factors play a role in deciding the cost; are you going to be using replication or encryption? Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier. One more point to add is that if Isilon were to become software-defined, it would be a good option, because currently it is only hardware-based; you would buy hardware, set those up in your data center, and it is done. If Isilon were to be software-defined, users could create their own hardware and install Isilon's software on low-cost servers, which is not currently available.
Senior Manager, Information Security & Infrastructure at National Football League
Real User
Top 5
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 10
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 10
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.
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...
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, it comes with many options. Based on customer needs and workload demands, I can customize the hardware configuration to meet the customer's budget in some way or another.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we have Volkswagen level agreements with Dell, which show better pricing compared to NetApp and Hitachi. However, we have a problem with the validity of their quotes, as they change the quotes even when we act on them within the valid time, which is not good.
Dell PowerScale was purchased directly from Dell, without going through local channels or marketplaces.
In my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I think Dell PowerScale has a good price for the product they are delivering.
The challenge right now in managing enterprise data is the market, the cost, the memory prices, and the drive prices. This is something that is very difficult for customers. However, they have also been looking at Apex from Dell to help alleviate some of those issues and provide more predictable costs. Dell has put forward a proposal that they are considering. Besides the current market regarding Dell PowerScale, I think the pricing is reasonable. However, currently it is not, but that is just a cycle. Dell has some solutions to help alleviate those issues, like Apex, and I think it is really good that they are able to do something like that to help customers.
I think the price is reasonable. We procured this during the time of COVID, around 2022, and the price was very competitive. If you are looking for technology, there will also be a price associated with it. Everything will be right if you look for good technology, good service, and good hardware capability, then you have to pay for that. There is not much difference price-wise. However, at the current scenario due to the shortage of chips and memory, the price is quite expensive now, but that is understandable. The license model is a bit expensive because every year you need to renew the license. This may discourage some customers from paying the license cost. If you go with the enterprise version, it is user-friendly and you will get many additional features. If you do not go with the license version, then you will miss out on a few advantages of Dell PowerScale that you could get with the license version.
The on-premises solution with Dell PowerScale, when we buy directly from Dell, is economical. We have done some level of comparison. Although in the current markets we have seen the price difference, it is economical compared to the public cloud.We did some ROI analysis in comparison to some other technology and with the public cloud as well. In that way, Dell PowerScale is very cost-effective. That could be the reason why we have chosen Dell PowerScale over other products.
The price is not dependent on the solution. It depends on the number of terabytes and user capacity, and the price will be calculated based on that.
In terms of pricing, I find it to be good, though not the best, as there are other products with better pricing than Dell PowerScale. However, it is value for money, and I feel satisfied with it.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisioning experience has been pleasant. Typically you have kickoff meetings and there are different teams that are engaged with myself and with other teams within my organization. That is a pleasant experience. It is sort of almost a white-glove experience, at least the way we order and provision these for our customers. The provisioning experience is very pleasant. However, pricing methodology is a difficult hurdle for us to sell to our customers.
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing is minimal. I have set up a few nodes in my time, but it has always been very easy. I do not have the actual pricing or anything, as I have not deployed nodes and been involved in the pricing structure.
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale is that pricing is very competitive. We are actually about to move to the APEX Flex option. Dell handles all setup, so I do not have to deal with any of it.
My experience with pricing, setup, cost, or licensing has been straightforward; through our partner, it is easy.
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is cost-effective.
As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government entity, the country policy does not allow direct purchases; it goes through a formal RFP process. We prepared an RFP, and the bidders and vendors participated in the bidding process. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled the requirement and was the most cost-effective option. This is how we made our selection.
Regarding pricing, Isilon can be cost-efficient; if you are using more capacity nodes without needing more performance, it won't affect your budget much. However, multiple factors play a role in deciding the cost; are you going to be using replication or encryption? Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier. One more point to add is that if Isilon were to become software-defined, it would be a good option, because currently it is only hardware-based; you would buy hardware, set those up in your data center, and it is done. If Isilon were to be software-defined, users could create their own hardware and install Isilon's software on low-cost servers, which is not currently available.
I am not aware of the pricing in Dell PowerScale (Isilon).
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.