Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs MinIO comparison

Dell Technologies and MinIO are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8, while MinIO is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.0. Dell Technologies holds a 8.8% mindshare in FaOS, compared to MinIO’s 18.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of MinIO users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Dell PowerScale and MinIO compete in the large-scale storage solutions category. Dell PowerScale seems to have the upper hand in scalability and enterprise-level features, while MinIO excels in simplicity and cost-effectiveness for specific object storage needs.

Features: Dell PowerScale is renowned for scalability at a petabyte level, S3 protocol support, and advanced cybersecurity measures. It also offers efficient storage utilization and flexible tiering options. MinIO is appreciated for its high throughput, AWS S3 compatibility, and open-source availability. It provides strong support for object storage and is known for its ease of use.

Room for Improvement: Dell PowerScale could enhance its pricing structure, smaller environment deployment, and cloud integration. Users seek improvements in load distribution, the InsightIQ interface, and small file handling. MinIO could improve its monitoring capabilities, enterprise environment deployment processes, and performance for extensive data operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerScale often deploys on-premises, offering dedicated infrastructure and structured customer support, though with mixed feedback on response times. MinIO provides flexible deployment across on-premises and cloud environments, emphasizing community support, which may lack in dedicated enterprise support.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale's extensive features and scalability justify its high cost, offering a strong return on investment through management ease. Its pricing includes potential extra charges for extended features. MinIO stands out with a free open-source version, allowing significant cost savings and aligning with cost-effective strategies, especially in smaller implementations.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 861,524 peers since 2012

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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.8%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 8.8%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MinIO is 18.5%, down from 23.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

Read full review

Scott Taylor

Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Manages large data sets efficiently with hybrid cloud integration

My organization is quite large, with about 30,000 employees. The growth has been substantial in areas such as radiology and genomics. One of the best features we've utilized recently is offload to cloud pools due to capacity constraints on-premise. We didn't want to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) straight away, so we utilized cloud pools to offload some data to Azure. That's really saved us in certain areas as we didn't have funding to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) until next year, which is why we utilized the cloud pools functionality to offload.

Read full review

Abdelrahim-Ahmad

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"We have integrated it with VMware. The integration process is pretty good. Especially with VMware, it helps with the capacity of it."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"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."

"I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten out of ten, and we continue to keep buying it."

"Its scalability has been huge for us."

"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."

"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."

"Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol."

"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"Saves a lot of time in generating and managing documents."

"Very good at object retrieval."

"The ability to spawn a MinIO Tenant on demand and shut it down right after is most valuable."

"I use the solution's basic object storage functionalities, like AWS S3 compatible APIs and creating buckets."

"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 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."

"Nice web interface, easy to use, with a low memory footprint."

"The initial setup was very easy - one click, and it was installed."

More MinIO pros

Cons

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."

"Its configuration should be easier."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The support offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."

"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."

"The biggest weakness is small file handling. Small file compression options are not enabled out of the box. It would be good to have this enabled by default."

"The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."

"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."

"The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS. It would be key if this was made possible."

"It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"The product's initial setup phase is complex."

"The product's security is open by default, without any SSL."

"We had minor bugs occasionally."

"With problems, visibility is hard because everything is in containers. Difficult to get to the logs in order to figure out what the problem was."

"Limited storage provided in the free version."

"MinIO could use a time patch on it. It could also use better documentation for some languages like Python."

"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."

"The monitoring capability is really bad and needs to be improved."

More MinIO cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool's pricing a seven to eight out of ten."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price could be cheaper."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"The price is a little high."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"It is a really expensive solution."

"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."

"Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time."

"It is an expensive solution."

"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."

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"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 use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"We use the solution's open-source version."

"This is an open-source solution but I am using the licensed version."

"This solution is open source so it is free."

"MinIO is a free open-source solution."

"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."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

We have to go through a certified reseller for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). From a value standpoint, it performs very well.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

There will always be room for improvement with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). They should add some new services that shoul...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about MinIO?

I like that if you have a problem, you can buy the home server. It is stable and robust.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MinIO?

We use the solution's open-source version.

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Dell ECS vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

Qumulo vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 4% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 14% of the time

Dell ECS vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 11% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 9% of the time

HPE StoreEasy vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 4% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs MinIO

Compared 53% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs MinIO

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ECS vs MinIO

Compared 5% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs MinIO

Compared 5% of the time

Scality RING vs MinIO

Compared 4% of the time

More MinIO Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

June 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

July 2025

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Buyer's Guide

MinIO

June 2025

Download MinIO product report

Also Known As

No data available

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

No data available

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

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

Centralized management: Manage your storage infrastructure from a single unified platform.
Data protection: Dell PowerScale offers security, data protection and replication tools. Back up and protect your data from cyber-attacks with an integrated ransomware defense system.
Artificial intelligence: PowerScale is the foundation for building an integrated and optimized IT infrastructure for AI projects, from concept to production.
Cloud support: Store and manage your data on the cloud and move data between your data center and the cloud. Dell PowerScale runs data-intensive cloud workloads with no outbound traffic costs.
Long-term storage: Dell PowerScale offers highly efficient and resilient active archive storage or long-term data retention for large-scale data archives. With the proven scalability architecture of PowerScale, you can meet your growing archiving demands. Dell PowerScale has a wide variety of enterprise-grade data protection and security options to keep your archived data safe.

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."

Dell Technologies

MinIO is an open-source object storage system. It is designed to efficiently store and retrieve unstructured data, such as photos, videos, and backups. MinIO can be used as a standalone object storage server or as part of a larger system, such as a data lake or a private cloud, and can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, making it a flexible storage solution for a variety of use cases.

MinIO’s features include erasure coding, bitrot protection, and checksum validation, which help ensure data integrity and reliability. The solution’s multi-tenancy support makes it ideal for multi-user environments. MinIO’s edge computing tools enable data storage and processing closer to users' locations, reducing latency and improving performance. MinIO can easily scale to accommodate storage and power demands, making it ideal for use in large-scale, data-intensive environments.

MinIO Benefits and Features:

MinIO offers several key benefits and features for organizations looking for a scalable and high-performing object storage solution:

Scalability: Horizontally scale to increase storage space and processing power as your needs grow.

High performance: MinIO’s edge computing and low latency provide fast data access.

Seamless integrations: MinIO is compatible with the Amazon S3 API, which enables integration with third-party systems and tools.

Data integrity: Security features, such as erasure coding, bitrot protection, and checksum validation, ensure data integrity and reliability.

Reduced costs: MinIO is an open-source solution, making it a cost-effective option for organizations looking for a scalable object storage solution.

Support: MinIO’s large open-source community of developers and users provides a wide range of resources and an active support network

Multi-tenancy: Multi-tenancy support makes MinIO suitable for use in multi-user environments.

Easy deployment: MinIO is easy to deploy and can run on a variety of platforms, including on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.

Access control: Role-based access control, enabling you to control access to data based on users permissions.

Event notifications: Automate workflows based on changes to objects in your storage.

Cross-region replication: Duplicate data between different regions for disaster recovery and data backup.

Intuitive interface: MinIO’s user-friendly dashboard can be accessed via any browser and can be used to perform multiple object operations including object creation and management.

Reviews from Real Users

MinIO stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its flexibility, integration options, and performance.

Süleyman Fazıl Y., a senior software engineer at a tech services company, writes, “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.”

Rebecca S., CTO at NIASE, says, “MinIO is much improved over the prior solution, updates are simple to apply, and we anticipate that future capacity requirements will be easier to meet. Our customers are using this solution to retrieve tens of thousands of objects (documents and files) per hour, and MinIO seems to be able to keep up with it.”

MinIO

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

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

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO

June 2025

Free Report: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. MinIO report.

See our list of best File and Object Storage vendors.

We monitor all File and Object Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.