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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Qumulo 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)
Qumulo
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
NAS (13th), File and Object Storage (21st)
 

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.
VinceVitro - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Useful data sharing, simple cluster scaling, and excellent support
One aspect of Qumulo that I hoped to see improved was its software upgrade process, which did see significant progress during my usage. Initially, upgrading the software resulted in several minutes of system downtime. However, by the time I departed last summer, the downtime had reduced to mere ten seconds. Although I am unsure if Qumulo has yet achieved a completely outage-free upgrade, I simply performed the upgrades early in the morning before the marketing department began its workday, so any downtime was inconsequential.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"We have looked at all of the platforms, and to see what Pure was able to do within a PoC environment meant that we never turned back our PoC environment."
"One could tell, the minute we switched to this program, everything ran a lot faster."
"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."
"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"The technical support has been excellent. I would give them a ten out of ten for support."
"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."
"Its scalability has been huge for us."
"Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us."
"Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and it is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced."
"It is a very stable product. I never faced any issues."
"The most valuable feature of Qumulo is the ability to share files and reliability."
"The feature that I like most is the analytics part of the file system."
"The ratio of total operational cost to complexity versus feature set is very good."
"The ratio of total operational cost to complexity versus feature set is very good."
"The most valuable feature is real-time analytics."
"The most valuable features of Qumulo are its rolling updates and all-day availability."
"The most valuable features of Qumulo are the ease of management and special permissions that are quick to enable. The overall performance of the solution is good."
 

Cons

"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"The price of this solution is high and should be lowered."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."
"Everything has been good, but we faced one issue last year while migrating volumes from one Pure Storage to another. The snapshots were not visible in the Veeam backup portal."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"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."
"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."
"We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us and we'd love to have one."
"The price always has room for improvement."
"The deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not really complex but depends on the hardware deployment."
"I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replacement."
"Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash."
"The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement."
"The price of the software is a bit expensive, so a reduction in cost would make it more competitive."
"Some anti-theft permissions do not transfer well to Qumulo."
"Qumulo should continue to expand automation and orchestration capabilities."
"There is plenty of room for improvement. In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates."
"Qumulo should continue to expand automation and orchestration capabilities."
"The support for iMac and protocols should be improved, not all features are available."
"In the next release, I would like to see the ability to have more control at a terminal level of the file system."
"In the future, I would like to see non-disruptive updates."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have had a couple of customers who have complained about the cost. It can be a little more expensive than some of the other platforms. After it has been installed, I have never had a customer say, "I wish we wouldn't have spent all that extra money." They have always been happy with the product after it has been installed. They might be on the fence about it because of the price, but everybody who I have ever seen install it, they are always happy with it."
"Price per terabyte is substantially higher than their competition. We would like to see it drop."
"We are finding the TCO of flash to be lower than SSD implementations."
"There are no licensing fees aside from the support."
"It's expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"There are no licensing fees or other costs."
"The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is high."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."
"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."
"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."
"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"The price of the solution is in the middle range compared to others. We look at the price per terabyte."
"The price of Qumulo is reasonable."
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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%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
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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,
County of Riverside Sheriff Department, Hyundai Mobis Automotive North America, University of Arizona, UCSD - San Diego Supercomputer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Sinclair Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Kaiser Permanente, Deluxe Creative, Vexcel Imaging, University of Florida, The Madison Square Garden Company, Arizona State University, Cinesite, San Diego Padres Baseball, Johns Hopkins University - School of Medicine, IHME, EllieMae, Washington State University.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Qumulo and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,383 professionals have used our research since 2012.