Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

• Research data
• Departmental file shares
• Data centre storage: NFS

We have two data centres in our university. We have Cisco UCS, Pure Storage, and are heavily virtualised with VMware. PowerScale is our unstructured data storage platform. It provides scaled-out storage and our high-level NFS across applications. It also provides all the storage for our researchers and business areas, as well as students, on the network.

With the exception of block workloads, which is primarily VMware, Oracle Databases, etc., everything else it is on PowerScale. It definitely has allowed us to consolidate the ease of management.

With the quotas having fewer large pools of storage in the data centres, we typically only have one or two Isilon clusters. That gives us the ability to multi-tenant or allocate data to different applications and isolate workloads. It is very efficient when managing that volume of storage. We are not tuning it every day or week. The only time that we are really doing anything with it is if we're planning an upgrade of some sort several times a year. Outside of that, it just does what we want it to do. 

We automate the vast majority of the things that we do on the Isilon clusters: provisioning of storage, allocation of storage, management of quotas wrapped into tens of thousands of students, and managing permissions. That's the level of support they have for their built-in API's, which is probably a huge game changer for us in the way that we manage the storage. It makes it far more efficient inside of PowerScale.

Compared to doing it manually, what we have been able to automate using the API is saving us at least tens of hours a month versus when we used to get service requests. We have even been able to delegate out to different areas. If we have an area with whom we do file shares, we delegate out the ability for them to create new shares and manage their permissions themselves. 

The solution allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. We see this in the big refresh that we did earlier in the year. After you have clicked the "Join" button and joined, you go to the old node and click remove, then wait for it to finish. You don't have to configure anything when you add new node types, they are automatically configured. You can tune them and override things if you want, but there is no configuration required.

PowerScale has enabled us to maximise the business value of our data and gain new insights from it. It gives us the ability to have our data stored and presented via whatever protocol is required. Now, we can look at all these different protocols without having to move or duplicate the data.

The solution allows you to focus on data management, rather than storage management, so you can get the most out of your data. We looked at the types of data that we have on the cluster, then we just target it based on the requirements. We don't have to worry about building up different capabilities, arrays, RAID types, etc. We just have the nodes, and through simple policy, can manage it as data rather than managing it as different RAID pools and capacity levels. If someone needs some data storage, then we ask what their requirements are and we just target based on that. Therefore, we manage it as a workload rather than a disk type. 

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.

We used it originally for archiving our video storage, and then we expanded it to include user shares. All of our unstructured data has been moved to PowerScale.

We have now expanded the OneFS to start to use Local S3 Buckets, that use the same API setup as Amazon, but lets us host the data onsite.

In addition we added Power Protect Data Manager that is allowed to backup the Shares and stores, allowing us to have a backup of everything on another location.

We moved our shares over. Now, instead of taking up a large amount of space on a virtual machine, our shares take it up on one appliance. The load on that virtual machine is much less and it makes it easy to future-proof it, because now we don't have to move it again in the next migration of servers.

We have saved about 30 percent on storage with it. And as we grow, we get more space, meaning the efficiency improves each time we add a node. We went from 75 percent efficiency to 82.5 percent efficiency when we expanded.

The solution provides us with the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. That really is nice. We did one use case where we put it out at the edge, and it was nice to have the Isilon at the edge. It really helped improve things. It helped the storage of the cameras, and it helped get the data back to the core in a reasonable time. It allowed us to go from the edge to the core and then up to the cloud, instead of trying to go from the very edge to cloud.

PowerScale also allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It simplifies the storage. It allows us to see everything as one large volume instead of having multiple volumes all over the place.

And when it comes to the business value of our data, it allows us to see what's being used and how it's being used, and we can do so much more quickly and efficiently. As a result, we can better evaluate how we're storing the data.

It has also helped us to reduce data silos. We used to have four video servers out there, all storing data. On the home farm, now, we're down to one server storing data in one location, and that includes all the user shares. 

All our data is in one place and that has increased performance. We could never afford to say, "Let's have this information on solid-state," and allowed the OneFS to decide, based on usage, of where it would be stored: on a fast drive or on a slow drive. It automatically does that in the background for us, instead of our having to manually move it and then have the user change where they get the information from.

In addition, it has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. It's all done in the same portal now. And while it hasn't reduced our number of storage admins, it has definitely reduced the time we spend looking at it, so we can focus on other efforts. It saves me about five hours a week.

Another benefit is that it allows us to focus on the data rather than where it's stored. Now, we don't have to worry about moving it around from place to place to get efficiencies out of the data. We just have it all in one place. The single interface, the SmartPools policy, decides where it needs to reside.

I am an administrator for Isilon in India. It provides storage to end users who develop their tasks and use it for simulation purposes, keeping their data isolated.

I use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to store and share data across different locations according to project-wise needs, which helps in cost savings related to power and in-house rack space.

PowerScale (formerly Isilon) is effectively a giant NAS. We have two clusters, one for production workloads and one for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity purposes. These clusters are installed in separate data-centers, physically located in two different places in the country. Both clusters were deployed at the same time when we first adopted the solution, and we have been growing them at an almost equal rate ever since.

Our production cluster is attached to our High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, and this was the primary use case in the beginning: to provide scale-out storage for the Bioinformatics team, who do omics analysis on plant and seafood organisms that we do scientific research on. As time went on, we expanded our use of the platform for other user groups in the organization.

Eventually, PowerScale became the de-facto solution for anything related to unstructured data or file-based storage. Today, we also use the platform to host users’ home directories, large media files, and really any kind of data that doesn't really fit anywhere else, such as in a SharePoint library or a structured database. Nowadays, almost everyone in the organisation is a direct or indirect user of the platform. The bulk of the storage, however, continues to be consumed by our HPC environment, and Bioinformaticians continue to be our largest users. But we also have data scientists, system modellers, chemists, and machine-learning engineers, to name a few. 

Our company has multiple sites throughout the country and overseas, with the two primary data-centers supporting our Head Office and most of the smaller sites. Some of these sites, however, have a need for local storage, so our DR/BCP PowerScale cluster receives replicated data from both our production cluster as well as these other file servers.

Before PowerScale we used to have a different EMC product. I believe it was VNX 5000, which is primarily a block storage array with some NAS functionality. We did not have a HPC environment, however we did have a group of servers that performed approximately the same function.

Back in those days, raw storage had to be partitioned into multiple LUNs, and presented as several independent block devices because of size limitations of the storage array. When one of these devices started to run out of space, it was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming to shift data away from it, which slowed down our science. We wanted a solution that would free our users from the overhead of all of that data wrangling. Isilon was a good fit because it enabled us to effectively consolidate five separate data stores into a single filesystem, providing a single point of entry to our data for all of our users.

PowerScale helped us consolidate our former block storage into a full-fledged, scale-out, file storage platform with great success. We then decided to expand our use cases further, replacing some of the ancillary Windows File Servers that provided network file shares in our Head Office. We now have a single platform for all our unstructured data needs at our main locations.

We have not explored using PowerScale cloud-enabling features yet, but it is in our roadmap. The fact that those features exist out of the box, and can be enabled as required is another reason the platform is so versatile.

The switch to PowerScale was transformative. Before we implemented it, users had to constantly move their data between different storage platforms, which was time consuming and a high barrier of entry for getting the most of our centralized compute. Distributed, parallel processing is challenging enough, to add data wrangling on top of it created massive cognitive overload. Scientists are always under pressure to deliver on time, and deadlines are unforgiving. The easier we can make leveraging technology for them, the better.

We officially launched our current HPC environment shortly after we introduced Isilon, supporting approximately 20 users. Today, that number has grown 17500% to over 350 users across all of our sites. In an organization with nearly 1,000 employees, that's more than a third of our workforce! I credit PowerScale as one of the critical factors responsible for that growth. PowerScale simplified data management because it allows you to present the same data via multiple different protocols (eg: SMB, NFS, FTP, HTTP, etc), tremendously reducing our users’ cognitive overhead.

Before adopting PowerScale, we also faced capacity constraints in our environment. I had to constantly ask end-users to clean up and remove files they no longer needed. Our block data stores were constantly sitting at around 90% utilization. Expanding the storage array was not only expensive: every time that we wanted to provision additional space we had to decide if it was justified to re-architect the environment versus adding yet another data store. And going with the later option meant going back to our users again to free up space before more capacity could be added. All of this wasted massive amounts of time, that could have otherwise been spent running jobs and doing science.

Once we introduced scale-out storage, capacity upgrades and expansion became straightforward. The procurement process was simplified because now we can easily project when we will hit 90% storage utilization, and our users have visibility of how much storage they are individually consuming thanks to accounting-only quotas, which help keeping storage usage down. PowerScale provides a lot of metrics out of the box, which are easy to navigate and visualize using InsightIQ, and most recently DataIQ.

I can certainly recommend PowerScale for mission-critical workloads, it is a powerful but simple platform with little administration overhead. We use it in production for a variety of use cases, and it would be hard for our organization to operate effectively without it.

TGen is a nonprofit biomedical research institute. Our focus is primarily on genomics, translating discoveries in the field of genomics into treatments for patients.

It is central to our data storage of scientific data. We sequence the human genomes of folks with different diseases, primarily cancer but also other disorders, e.g., rare childhood disorders and people with mitochondrial diseases as well as neurological diseases. When you do this, it generates a considerable amount of data. Each time that a whole genome sequence is run, you generate anywhere from four to eight terabytes of data. For example, if you are looking at 1,000 patients, that can be anywhere from four to eight petabytes of data. TGen has about seven petabytes of storage being used for storing these genomes, which is a fair amount.

Isilon is an on-prem, scale-out storage. The nodes are linked together through a back-end high-speed interconnect. 

We are running current versions of software on the node. It has versions now. The nomenclature is sometimes not the easiest to follow, because they still like to rebrand things. 

It has given us the capability to focus on our prime objective, which is science, without having to necessarily be concerned about the back-end infrastructure that powers it. This is something we are always looking to achieve: Being able to focus on our prime mission without having technology get in the way. Scientists don't want to learn all about your storage system. They just want to do their science.

It is a critical piece for storing scientific data for our Institute. It is where we put our most valuable and precious data. We also leverage it for work on administrative data, spreadsheets, Word documents, etc. So, it is flexible. We access it via NFS and SMB. Those are the two primary methods of access that we use along with some others, such as S3 for some particular use cases.

Deploying and managing storage at a petabyte scale using Isilon is extremely simple. The user interface for management tasks is intuitive. The documentation is thorough and good, and if you get stuck, then the support is very capable. Overall, I have confidence that we can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them.

PowerScale has helped us by consolidating the data without having it dispersed. Prior to this solution, we would have many different physically separate storage solutions. To do the science, sometimes data needs to go from one place to another. Moving your data at a petabyte scale, or even at hundreds of terabytes, is very time-consuming and expensive. By having the consolidation within these clusters, it has enabled us to very easily access and compute data without having to push it around to a bunch of different places.

We have a "thinly provisioned" workforce. One of the crucial aspects is that we can continue to scale a solution without having to add more humans to take care of it.

We use it for storage in a scale-out data processing system.

It is a physical storage platform. We have several different nodes that all act as one large storage cluster.

PowerScale has allowed us to bring data acquisition and some of the initial data processing that we would typically do in the field here on-premise. That has let us speed things up from a data delivery standpoint. 

It has let us really optimize our consistency. We've been able to take something that several different people were doing out in the field and just maintain it here with one person able to do a really good job of making sure that our data quality is very high and that our consistency in processing is a lot more static. It has prevented quite a few possible issues, which has also allowed us to expand from some of our jobs, where we used to go and acquire this data in the field. The systems out there have three servers, and we're able to expand up to 10 or 12 servers all processing that data. Therefore, it's made our turnaround on data pretty quick.

PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It makes it to where we don't have to have a full-time storage guy on-premise. We are able to manage our storage on PowerScale without needing to have a team. 

The solution does provide us the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. However, that is not something that we typically do, as we have a fairly large cluster. We did have one instance where we had a very large job that was going to require about two petabytes of data. We were able to purchase that and get it installed pretty quickly, which definitely helped us out.

It is simple to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. We have almost three and a half petabytes, and it's a very low impact to our team as far as the amount of effort and babysitting that we have to do on it. This has really changed the way our company can acquire and process data in the field, allowing us to differentiate ourselves against all our competitors. None of the other competitors in our market are able to handle jobs, either in the size or density that we have been able to do so far.

PowerScale allows us to focus on data management, rather than storage management, getting the most of our data. This is mainly because the system almost manages itself. Instead of having to sit and handle storage volumes, RAID groups, LUNs, or things that in traditional storage architecture our group would have to manage, we are able to just create shares. The end user side is able to access those shares just like they would any regular storage or file server. That really helped us make sure that we're not having to manage storage the way we would with a traditional block storage or any other storage that we've tried so far.

It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door.

Dell PowerScale helps us manage a variety of unstructured data for healthcare and manufacturing clients. This allows the data to be stored and accessed by different types of systems like system-to-system access and user-to-system access. Dell PowerScale helps the data make sense in environments where we are also managing the data engine portion for our customers. We are able to use different Dell technologies for moving and saving data. Dell PowerScale is the best option for cost based on the environment.

We initially deployed PowerScale on-prem and then started to take advantage of the cloud but the cost became a factor. The customers feel more confident with the on-prem deployment.

Our customers have seen improvement in performance, space, and flexibility for growth and management of data protection through snapshots and other systems.

The AI models are something we are looking forward to trying but are not there yet. The algorithms are specific to each company and their industry. One of the most important things is the data localization. Many scenarios require the project data traffic to be close to where it is generated and read. A lot of interaction is between users and systems. So data localization is one of the most important things in terms of using the data algorithm.

We don't need to manage our PowerScale and run its storage from any location yet but it is something that is coming for sure because several customers have centralized data in main data centers. But in different locations across the globe. So this is going to be a topic. I think that through the different functionalities that the Dell platform can grant, it will be a great player.

When it comes to the flexibility for supporting various data workloads while protecting them, the combination of PowerScale and PPDM and all the other components of the data protection solution right now is key. So the automatic integration between the products is one of the killer features of the solution itself.

PowerScale helped us to reduce data silos. This has simplified the management of large data environments in terms of scalability and management instead of having a different solution for the right reports to see how the data evolves and how to better manage them. PowerScale can do that in combination with the other components of the ecosystem.

In terms of risk reduction, We need to mention the data management and the recovery part, So of course, the integration with the data domain is key. The fact that we can rely on these functions, and the fact that we also manage different customers, and possess the recovery plans and tests that can prove the solution is working.