Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nasuni comparison

Read 35 Nasuni reviews

2,056 Views
1,066 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: March 2025).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni

Download the complete report

Helped 845,040 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

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

7th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (1st), Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Storage (3rd), Cloud Backup (13th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (9th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 17.8%, up from 17.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 5.5%, up from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS

Featured Reviews

Eric Burgueño

High-Performance Computing Services Manager at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited

Simplified data management, tremendously reducing our users’ cognitive overhead

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. You can either access a file because it can be access by anyone in the organization, or you cannot at all. There is no in-between. HTTP is not considered a first-class data access protocol, so the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply. However, with the recent introduction of S3 starting from OneFS 9, I believe the necessary plumbing is already there for HTTPS to also be elevated to a first-class protocol in the future because both protocols sit behind a web server under the hood. It does not sound like it would be too complicated to implement, but it would be a valuable feature and it is currently missing.

Read full review

Richard McGregor

Global Server & Storage Manager at Conde Nast Publications

Removes a lot of infrastructure, allows us to restore files instantly, and is simple to work with

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. Knowing that it's all protected from ransomware is also a very big advantage at the moment with the number of ransomware attacks that you see out there. Nasuni is being very protective of that, which is quite good to hear. There were times when we had to replace the filers we've had issues with, and because we know all our data is protected in AWS, we could just turn them off and spin them up. As quickly as in an hour or so, we were back working with zero downtime. That area of functionality is really good. In terms of ease of management, it's the easiest one you can use. It's very simple. It's very easy to set up, very easy to configure, and very easy to manage.

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

"Dell PowerScale is a scalable solution. It allows non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance of the system."

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

"The tool's most valuable features are scalability and stability."

"The most valuable feature is its single space of storage."

"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 most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale is its scalability."

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

"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."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR."

"The solution gives us a breakdown and summary of every resource and each volume within every resource. It tells us the code within a given volume, so I can go in there and look at the size of the files that are stored there. Nasuni gives me the big picture and allows me to connect things like Power BI to any endpoint. I can take that tabular information from Nasuni and look at it in a graph."

"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery. We can fully recover a site in two hours."

"Nasuni gives us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data, which is very important to us. We have everything that we need to look at in a single pane of glass."

"Continuous File Versioning is one of the best features because it helps you to restore at any point in time. That means you don't have to worry about a ransomware attack. Even if that attack happens, you can restore all the data to five minutes ago and save everything."

"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."

"Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using about eight to 10 different types of vendors or small storage boxes for provisioning and shared access for users. We got rid of all those. That has eliminated operational overhead and footprint at our data center. We don't have to worry about any hardware or monitoring particular devices, and hundreds of devices have been decommissioned. Now, for provisioning, everything is on Nasuni. I assume this has made a big difference in costs."

"The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on."

More Nasuni pros

Cons

"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."

"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."

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

"The tool's support team and the way the cases are handled by the product's technical support team are both areas of concern where improvements are required."

"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."

"The thing that they are working on now, and we are following closely is more native cloud integrations. The way that we envision workloads in the future is around moving compute to data instead of the other way around. So, we would like to have a single pane glass to manage storage across a variety of different platforms, including native cloud. That would be awesome."

"Always, there is room for improvement in terms of cybersecurity, as new challenges are continually emerging in the market."

"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy."

"Nasuni does not support different retention policies within the same volume, so you have to keep creating volumes for retention policies. When you create a new volume, it means you're starting from zero all over again. You can't move data between two volumes. You have to move them from your physical device to Nasuni or your cloud device to Nasuni."

"The only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com."

"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."

"One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality."

"When we first set up our bandwidth limiting, we had a few problems when it came to managing it. This is something that could be made easier; however, we were able to make the changes that we needed to for our environment."

"The Nasuni file storage platform doesn't work well when there are a high number of small files. This is the case when a directory structure contains more than 10,000 or 20,000 small files, e.g., 5 KB, 10 KB, or 15 KB. When the user is accessing these files from another geographical location, they might face a slow response or timeouts when connecting to the shares, and then to the files. This is because the file size is small. There is a scope of improvement with this solution when it comes to accessing a large number of small files."

"The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue."

More Nasuni cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."

"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."

"The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it."

"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."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"It has a license fee as well as hardware costs, which we would incur if we want to use Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway for upgrades."

"Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low."

"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."

"With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution."

"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."

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

"The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair."

"Its pricing can get a tad expensive. When we first took Nasuni out, we were just paying for the service. We got storage at a reduced rate. It has now changed, and they're now more of an all-in-one type of thing. It can be quite expensive, but it works out. Apart from that, licensing-wise, it's very simple."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

23%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

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)?

Every time we purchase a PowerScale solution, we buy four nodes for one data center and four for another, with five years of maintenance covered by Dell. It's a high-cost offering amounting to thre...

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

Dell's customer service needs improvement. Specifically, hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline. I face difficulty in tracing and finding the right suppor...

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 ...

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Comparisons

Compared 15% of the time

Dell ECS vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 13% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 11% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 9% of the time

DDN Storage Fusion Architecture NVMe vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 1% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

Panzura CloudFS vs Nasuni

Compared 19% of the time

Egnyte vs Nasuni

Compared 11% of the time

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Nasuni

Compared 9% of the time

Qumulo vs Nasuni

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Nasuni

Compared 3% of the time

More Nasuni Competitors

Product Reports

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Download Nasuni product report

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

No data available

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."

Dell Technologies

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