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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs MinIO comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
215
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
NAS (1st), File and Object Storage (2nd)
MinIO
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
BE
Systems Engineer at Unisity LLC
Flexibility and reliability have supported seamless data growth
I cannot think of anything to improve about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The hardest challenge we have is due to how we've bought things over time. The way that we moved to the PowerEdge platform for the newer systems creates a scale problem as I still buy the older style systems, which are more dense storage. They're different chassis, so the problem we run into in the data center is the depth of the actual equipment. The newer equipment, if we buy an FX910 or a 900, it's a lot shorter in scale than if I buy an 83,000, which is much bigger. This makes it more complicated for deployment.
Abdelrahim-Ahmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Provides good object storage functionalities
MinIO should provide an easier subscription model for companies that don't have a huge amount of data. Our company has a maximum of 100 terabytes of data. The solution should provide more bugging tools in the open-source version to encourage people to buy the support services. It's not an easy decision. If I go to the management and tell them that I need to buy a service, there should be an easier subscription model for companies that don't have huge amounts of data. For me, getting a subscription for 15,000 a year for a system already in production might be a bit hard. I think MinIO supports a minimum of one petabyte or 100 terabytes of data. Since we don't have such huge amounts of data, buying a subscription for the solution is a bit difficult. Hence, we're only using the open-source version for now. If MinIO becomes really crucial for our business, we could ask the management to get a subscription.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"The benefits were realized right away. Between the flash array and the compression, you can really see how good it is. Our databases run a lot better now."
"We saw a vast improvement when we switched over to using the Pure Storage model over the XtremIO."
"The reliability is very good."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon, making it easier and more cost-effective with just one point of contact."
"My experience with Dell as a vendor is pretty good; they are probably one of the best in the industry."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) helps improve the way the organization functions through massive scalability, high performance, a single file system, high availability and reliability, flexible protocols, support for NFS, SMB, HDFS, strong security, cloud integration, efficiency, data protection, snapshot, queue, and sync queue, optimized for unstructured data."
"We use the solution internally to support our own managed servers and run our own support center."
"The ease of use of this solution has been the most valuable aspect as well as the SyncIQ and snapshot features."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"PowerScale is one of those things that will grow in your environment; once you start it with one thing, you'll learn that it can do much more, very quickly."
"What I like the most about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that the storage capacity is very high."
"Reliable erasure coding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of management and administration."
"With MinIO, we managed to go forward with our cryptocurrency mining project."
"The most valuable features are that MinIO is open, it works on-premise, and is compatible with the Amazon industry which is great for finding compatible libraries in many languages which is very good for developers."
"The container installation features are good. The S3 feature provisions the storage buckets making it easy. It allows me to spin up the public buckets with open-source technology."
"The features that I have found most valuable with MinIO is its coding bit rot protection and how it distributes the workload over all the servers."
"The initial setup was straightforward as MinIO provided good support documentation and took a couple of days to complete."
"We use MinIO for enterprise file storage."
 

Cons

"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"Technical support needs improvement. With respect to them being able to respond, they're more marketing people, less technical."
"The product could improve by providing the capability to support NAS storage – CIFS and NFS."
"It falls far short of protocol support."
"Based on my experience with various technologies like EMC, NetApp, and Pure Storage, one area for improvement is compliance certifications. NetApp excels in this area, particularly in the American Army or defense sector, where NetApp has approval, whereas others are striving to achieve the same. NetApp also delivers security, ransomware protection, and scale-up capabilities more effectively."
"I would like to see box-to-box encryption on replication included in the next release."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) certainly has room for improvement; since it does not provide SAN at the moment, I would look for Dell to create a complete unified solution just like NetApp."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"Data storage performance needs to be improved."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"My experience with customer service and technical support has been challenging. The reason is that it is difficult to find subject matter experts around the solution."
"The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."
"The deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not really complex but depends on the hardware deployment."
"On Kubernetes, it wasn't as stable as we wanted it to be."
"MinIO can sometimes crash because of the dependency in underlying OS software layers."
"Limited storage provided in the free version."
"The product's security is open by default, without any SSL, which could be an area for improvement."
"An area that could be improved is the limited storage provided in the free version of this tool."
"Lacks documentation for non-Kubernetes users."
"I feel there is a lack of good addons to integrate without having to use third-party applications."
"The MinIO dashboard is minimal as there are only a couple of features inside the dashboard for a basic user. I would like this to be more robust with more click-around features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price was slightly higher than others, but competitive, if you consider all the other features that you get from it."
"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"In the beginning, we saw that the price is not very good. When we made some compilations about the deduplication and the compression and what the equipment does, including the differentiation of upper management of the storage, the price was not so bad. However, in the beginning, the price was very difficult to justify."
"No storage device is cheap, but Pure Storage is fairly priced and offers what you pay for. You get all the licenses in the future when you purchase a license."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"The price of the solution is not expensive."
"When you are paying more than you were paying for the storage space, you'd like the cost to be less. If they could get into the spinning disk kind of cost, that would be it."
"Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."
"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."
"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 general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."
"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 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."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"MinIO is a free open-source solution."
"This solution is open source so it is free."
"This is an open-source solution but I am using the licensed version."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"My company hasn't tried the version of the solution where we need to pay to use it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise150
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise46
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government ...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replace...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What needs improvement with MinIO?
* Rolling upgrades, vs. upgrading and restarting all daemons at the same time, which is risky and impactful. * Remov...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
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