We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and IBM FlashSystem based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to it, and IT spreads out the load. We've added multiple nodes to the system since deploying it. The process is pretty seamless, and we are able to do it with no downtime. It's a very easy process to do."
"The solution has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. Rather than managing all the different workloads on different storage arrays, Windows Servers, etc., we just have one place per data centre where we manage all their unstructured data, saving us time."
"For maximizing storage utilization, PowerScale is great. When you write the data to it, it spreads it out to all the nodes, so you get all the performance from the entire pool."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"IBM FlashSystem has been stable in our operations."
"Over the years, it has become increasingly user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"The feature I find most valuable, is the deduplication, because the nature of the data that we are using in our current environment, has a lot of replicated data."
"The most valuable features of IBM FlashSystem are performance and security."
"The initial setup was really straightforward. It was not complex. Deployment took one month, due to the data migration duration."
"The GUI is very easy and performance is also good."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol. At the present, you cannot protect access to data via HTTP or HTTPS the same way that you can secure data access through other protocols like NFS or SMB[...]the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit expensive compared to other products."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
"I have looked at a few pages of a report I download and I saw a graph there regarding software-defined vendors. IBM is not in a good position on this graph. I know that they are working very hard on this, to make it much better and to get to a level where it's not only hardware but also software to provide a complete solution."
"The product needs to improve their scalability."
"When you provision a datastore auto-format takes a long time"
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"A big area for improvement is that the data reduction pool feature is not recommended for use in a production environment because it has stability and performance issues."
"It could be easier to implement."
"I think the only thing the developers can look at, is that it is limited to 25 gigabytes currently. In the next release they might want to increase that."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 39 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) writes "We can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and IBM Scale-out NAS, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Huawei OceanStor. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
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