Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nasuni comparison

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Nasuni and Dell PowerScale compete in the cloud file storage and data management sector. Nasuni seems to have an edge with its disaster recovery and flexibility, whereas Dell PowerScale requires more management for diverse workloads.

Features: Nasuni offers global file locking, unlimited storage capacity, and quick disaster recovery, simplifying IT operations and eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure. Dell PowerScale provides scalable data management with unified permission models, multi-platform access, and efficient data distribution, supporting large data handling.

Room for Improvement: Nasuni needs to boost file access speed, third-party integration capabilities, and address slow replication issues. Dell PowerScale's challenges include costly redundancy, limited cloud integration, and user concerns over pricing and object storage management efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nasuni excels with a hybrid cloud model, praised for deployment flexibility and responsive customer service. Dell PowerScale offers a more complex on-premises deployment with private cloud options, and customer service receives mixed reviews, particularly in response speed.

Pricing and ROI: Nasuni's pricing includes cloud and object storage fees, providing value via efficient data management and reduced hardware costs despite not being the cheapest option. Dell PowerScale is noted for its high initial investment but offers a fair total cost of ownership. Both solutions deliver ROI, but Nasuni significantly cuts infrastructure costs and boosts operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni Report (Updated: December 2024).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni

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Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Ranking in NAS

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File and Object Storage (3rd)

Nasuni

Ranking in NAS

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (1st), Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Storage (3rd), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 24.0%, up from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 6.4%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS

Featured Reviews

Jack Vo

Senior IT Manager at ams OSRAM

Ensures that data is safely stored and easily accessible, providing peace of mind with robust security measures

The solution can be integrated with an automation system. Dell uses another framework developed in-house. They can integrate it with machines. Sometimes, Dell PowerScale can have issues with ID, window, or mapping errors. For example, a shareholder or user might not fully understand what they're doing, which can cause problems. Occasionally, we experience connection issues, requiring us to remap the folder. Dell PowerScale might need to remap or update the credentials in such cases. For instance, if you have many shared folders already mapped, it might take time to remap or redo the credentials.

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Greg Robson

Product Owner, Collaboration & Productivity at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files

Nasuni provides enough reporting to see what's happening. You can see the number of shares, total volume, issues, conflicts, etc., but it doesn't provide much visibility from a content perspective. For example, it doesn't tell you the data age. When you're trying to sort and filter information, the data creation date is a critical factor. Nasuni doesn't give you that. You can't get a count of all the file types, like the number of PDFs, Word docs, and PPT files. It lacks some content reporting. Then again, it's doing what it is designed to do. Nasuni provides a management console that lets you do specific functions, and it does those well. However, they haven't tried to include functionality that would be useful to people who want to manage the information at a global level. We have to use another tool for that, but it isn't expensive. We run scripts that take a month or more to complete because we have a lot of data. It's taking us a long time to get more detailed information on what is in there. It would be handy if Nasuni offered built-in features for reporting on data ages and file types.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dell PowerScale includes a wealth of features that are important from a security and recovery perspective."

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

"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."

"The best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."

"PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."

"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."

"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."

"The solution's scalability is very good."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"Nasuni offers us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data, which is definitely important to us. It simplifies IT operations tremendously. Because it is taking continuous snapshots, it eliminates a lot of work that was done previously when trying to manage backing up and restoring data files."

"I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds."

"Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information."

"I like the unlimited snapshotting."

"It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components."

"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of the backup and restore functions."

"The most important feature is that things are backed up automatically in AWS. We have a lot of remote sites where there is a tiny server onsite and, in a lot of cases, we really don't have to back them up because the data is automatically copied to AWS. The cloud replication is the most useful functionality for us."

"With Nasuni Management Console (NMC), we get a single, centralized view of our entire internal structure and data center structure. This is very important because this caters to remote locations. One of the main care center teams is dependent on this solution. As it is directly connected to customers for the calls that they receive and troubleshoot, they can then help customers out in case they are not able to place an order."

More Nasuni pros

Cons

"Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price."

"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."

"Dell PowerScale can improve on its multi-tenant part because as a service provider, we have bigger clusters in data centers where we can serve multiple customers and grant them dedicated management points and automation features that can be managed in a multi-tenant environment."

"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."

"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."

"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."

"The pricing could be reduced."

"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"Some of their cross-platform features are really good, but it could always use more."

"I would like to see improvement in the training Nasuni provides. Compared to some of the other vendors out there, like Microsoft, where you can find how-to videos, Nasuni only has a lot of PDF documents that you have to go hunting for. It's workable, it certainly isn't a problem, but video walkthroughs would always be helpful."

"Some applications may not be suited for the Nasuni environment. You may need something with better performance. Otherwise, if you want to run daily operations or some file system, it's a good bet."

"The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes."

"We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that."

"The performance of the filesystem could be improved."

"The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes."

"The user-friendliness of its access needs improvement. When I log into the console, I see all the files that we handle globally. There are hundreds of Nasuni files that I can see on the console, but no way that I can filter them down. While this is a small thing, I need to scroll down and select the ones that I want. "Control F" doesn't work nor is there a dropdown menu that I can click on and select the ones that I want."

More Nasuni cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."

"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."

"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."

"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."

"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."

"The price of the solution is high."

"The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD per terabyte."

"I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable."

"Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk."

"Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license."

"There are annual costs that we pay for maintaining all of the snapshot history in the cloud. That is the primary cost that we pay. We occasionally buy newer Nasuni appliances or deploy them to new offices when the need occurs. That capital equipment expenses is less than the cost of buying new file storage systems. For the most part, you are trading a CapEx cost of storage equipment for an OpEx cost for management of all the snapshot data in the cloud."

"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."

"They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup)."

"There are cheaper forms of storage, but Nasuni is fairly priced for the functionality it offers. I can get basic file shares provisioned in Azure and pay for the storage and the CPU. The overall cost would be much less than Nasuni, but I would need to build the management console and encryption process, so it would cost a lot to develop that kind of functionality."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

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824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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)?

The pricing of Dell solutions is higher than that of Huawei.

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

Always, there is room for improvement in terms of cybersecurity, as new challenges are continually emerging in the market. However, in our current usage, we find it satisfactory.

Does Nasuni have a good pricing model?

Based on the experience of my organization, Nasuni is definitely worth the money, since it gives you an all-in-one solution where you'd usually need several programs. About the cost, there isn't a ...

Is it easy to restore files with Nasuni?

As someone who has used this feature of Nasuni I can tell you - yes, it's good for file recovery and you'll definitely benefit from very quick times. I can't tell you if it's the best one because I...

What features and services does Nasuni offer?

Hi, if you pick Nasuni, you'll be benefiting from many services for a good price. Well, it's a personalized price you get after an agreement with the company but in my organization's case, it is a ...

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Product Reports

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

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Dell Technologies

Overview

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."

Nasuni is a file data services enterprise focused on assisting firms with their digital transformation, global expansion, and information awareness. The Nasuni File Data Platform is a suite of cloud-based services designed to enhance user productivity, ensure business continuity, provide data intelligence, offer cloud options, and simplify global infrastructure. This platform and its auxiliary services are projected to replace conventional file infrastructure such as network attached storage (NAS), backup, and Disaster Recovery (DR), with an expandable cloud-scale solution. By storing file data in scalable cloud object storage from multiple providers, Nasuni positions itself as a cloud-native alternative for traditional NAS and file server infrastructure. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Nasuni serves sectors like manufacturing, construction, technology, oil and gas, financial services, and public sector worldwide, offering its services in more than 70 countries.

Reviews from Real Users

James J., IT Manager at a marketing services firm, says Nasuni’s management dashboard is helpful because he's able to view all of the different filers at once rather than check each one of them individually. He values the software’s security, reliability, good performance, helpful alerting, and responsive support.

According to a Server Engineering Services Lead at a mining and metals company, Nasuni offers good OR and DR capabilities, performs well, offers data security, and continuous file versioning helps recover from hardware failures.

The Managing Director of IT at a construction company appreciates Nasuni because it eliminates a lot of work that was previously done when managing backing up and restoring data files.

Sample Customers

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,

American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni