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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage 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
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
NAS (2nd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (1st)
 

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.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"If you factor in the ease in terms of operations, as well as the cost of the array compared to other solid state arrays, it becomes a clear positive for Pure Storage."
"Manageability is its most valuable feature; it is simplified storage, as we don't have to maintain or administer it on a daily basis, which is good, and we can depend on the solution's ability to phone home and leverage the built-in support function of the product."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"It releases those to new teams within minutes at a very small storage cost amount."
"We transferred our old architecture from hyper storage to all-flash storage, which made our business faster and more connected to our customers."
"Dell has the AI to protect the EMA."
"The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed, which benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead."
"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."
"The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once."
"It's helpful that we're able to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"The tool's most valuable features are high density and scalability."
"It is stable and very user-friendly."
"The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed, which benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead."
"I can compare Red Hat Ceph Storage with products from other vendors; I explored quite a few, but I still find that Red Hat Ceph Storage is making the most disruption."
"We have some legacy servers that can be associated with this structure. With Ceph, we can rearrange these machines and reuse our investment."
"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."
"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."
"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."
"What I found most valuable from Red Hat Ceph Storage is integration because if you are talking about a solution that consists purely of Red Hat products, this is where integration benefits come in."
"Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives. The solution continues working even when there are errors."
"Stratus allows more reliability than all the other types of computers available."
 

Cons

"Storage. There could be better storage."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"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."
"Improvements could be made on the object storage side."
"The solution lacks a cloud version."
"The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS."
"The technical support is average. There are certainly not the best that we have ever dealt with, but far from the worst ones."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"Perhaps if there was a local chatbot built within the system or on the dashboard where we could directly ask for anything on the OneFS, it could help us."
"When it comes to the capabilities of Red Hat Ceph Storage such as object, block, and file storage, I am not fully satisfied."
"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."
"I have encountered issues with stability when replication factor was not 3, which is the default and recommended value."
"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."
"Please create a failback solution for OpenStack replication and maybe QoS to allow guaranteed IOPS."
"While the documentation for Ceph Storage is helpful, it could be improved."
"If you use for any other solution like other Kubernetes solutions, it's not very suitable."
"This product uses a lot of CPU and network bandwidth."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cost-effective because after buying a subscription, they provide a service to upgrade hardware for free. They are providing so many features. When you consider the features provided, it is cost-effective."
"Because of the SSD, it is cheaper because I am not purchasing so many disks."
"There should be quite a bit of reduction of TCO with just licensing (and stuff) because we run the VM environment off it."
"Pricing is moderate. It is neither cheap nor expensive."
"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"It's priced higher than 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."
"The pricing is excellent."
"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"The solution's licensing cost varies based on capacity and performance requirements."
"The price of the solution is high."
"The price of Red Hat Ceph Storage is reasonable."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"We never used the paid support."
"There is no cost for software."
"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise44
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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 do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?
The high availability of the solution is important to us.
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
Ceph
 

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,
Dell, DreamHost
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.