FreeNAS and Dell PowerScale compete in the network-attached storage category. Dell PowerScale appears to have the upper hand due to its enhanced scalability and enterprise features, appealing to large-scale environments.
Features: FreeNAS is appreciated for its support of the ZFS file system, data protection features, and flexibility in hardware deployment. Dell PowerScale offers advanced data management, seamless scalability, and high-performance tuning options suitable for significant storage demands.
Room for Improvement: FreeNAS could improve in terms of their user interface design, automated updates, and increasing official support options. Dell PowerScale might enhance integration with lower-tier storage solutions, reduce hardware costs, and provide better licensing transparency.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: FreeNAS is known for its straightforward setup on diverse hardware and a supportive community, although it may necessitate more technical expertise. Dell PowerScale is favored for its smooth integration processes and comprehensive support services, easing enterprise-level deployments.
Pricing and ROI: FreeNAS presents an economical setup due to its open-source nature, promising substantial ROI for smaller deployments. Dell PowerScale demands higher initial investment but offers long-term value and performance, appealing to enterprises with larger financial plans aiming for extended returns.
Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) storage solutions are designed to help manage data for enterprises of all types. Dell PowerScale systems are simple to install, manage, and scale to virtually any size and include a choice of all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes. Dell PowerScale solutions stay flexible and reliable no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future.
With Dell PowerScale, your data lake always stays simple to manage, simple to grow, simple to protect, and simple enough to handle the most demanding current and future workloads.
Ideal for companies of any size, from small enterprises to multi-national ones, Dell PowerScale storage provides secure collaboration, modular scalability, flexible consumption models, and easy cloud integrations, all with management tools spanning multiple platforms.
Key Benefits of Dell EMC PowerScale Storage
Reviews from Real Users
Dell EMC PowerScale storage stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its scalability capabilities and its user-friendly centralized management system.
Rachel B., a chief operations officer & acting CFO at Like a Photon, writes, "PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale."
Keith B., the director of IT at NatureFresh Farms, writes, "The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes, and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."
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