Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7, while NVIDIA is ranked #20. Dell Technologies holds a 8.3% mindshare in FaOS, compared to NVIDIA’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NVIDIA users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Read 51 Dell PowerScale (Isilon) reviews

9,037 Views
4,427 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

SwiftStack [EOL]

Read 8 SwiftStack [EOL] reviews

1,072 Views
901 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

SwiftStack [EOL]

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and SwiftStack [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. SwiftStack [EOL] Report (Updated: September 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. SwiftStack [EOL]

September 2024

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Helped 802,829 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Ranking in File and Object Storage

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NAS (1st)

SwiftStack [EOL]

Ranking in File and Object Storage

20th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 8.3%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SwiftStack [EOL] is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

reviewer2402925

Group manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 20, 2024

Offers reliability along with an easy deployment phase

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. When replacing hardware parts of the tool, there are about 15 steps to follow before our company gets the parts sent over to us by Dell, making it an area that we feel consists of a lot of unnecessary work for our employees. Dell should streamline the aforementioned process and make it just one or two steps instead of making users go through 15 steps. The support offered after installing the tool to deal with the problems associated with the tool could be a little bit better. After the installation phase, the tool's support services have certain shortcomings because our company is not allowed to use or send the automated error reports back to Dell. The aforementioned process needs to be manually handled by Dell and us, which is why it takes so long, even though we are eligible to get help from a dedicated support engineer. Processing logs and other stuff takes time.

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Engineerd3fd

Engineering Manager at BAE Systems

Feb 22, 2021

We are able to dynamically grow storage at a lower cost

The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap. With some of the hierarchy, old management storage policies, I would like to be able to move data between different types of storage policies. One of the things that has come up before was being able to do distributed erasure coding. Right now, erasure coding is only supported locally redundant. Products, like Scality, support the ability using multiple rings to do erasure coding that's globally redundant.

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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

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

"Dell PowerScale overall is easy to use."

"The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and ease of implementation."

"The fact that we were able to set it up, use it, and, for the most part, didn't have to worry about it after we had it set up has been valuable."

"The solution is stable."

"We use the solution internally to support our own managed servers and run our own support center."

"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."

"The tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

"The general consensus on what we've done is that the restores coming back from it have been faster than they were from our prior vendor. Ingest speeds are fine. The restore speeds have improved."

"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."

"The most valuable feature is its versatility. We use 1space and we can use it for almost anything: for our cloud service, for backups of VMs."

"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."

"The performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."

"In terms of the hardware flexibility, with SwiftStack not being a hardware company, I literally buy any hardware that's the least expensive, from any vendor... from a flexibility standpoint, I think it's fantastic. I can go to anybody, anywhere - any vendor - and get my hardware."

"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."

"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pros

Cons

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

"The solution can be integrated with an automation system. Dell uses another framework developed in-house. They can integrate it with machines."

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

"The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path."

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

"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."

"There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things."

"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."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."

"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."

"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."

"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."

"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."

"It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st."

"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."

"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."

"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."

"The price of the solution is high."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

"It's pricey for us because we're a nonprofit. I'm not privy to any amount or cost, but I have been told that it is pricey. There are no costs in addition to the licensing fees, and it seems to come with the support."

"All in, with hardware and everything else - and I hate to say a dollar amount because it's been awhile since I computed it - I know I'm under the $300 to $500 per terabyte mark. I call that my "all in" price, which has replications built in and protections built in."

"The annual support and maintenance costs compared to our old solution for backups had about a two-thirds savings, so about a 60% annual savings on our support and maintenance contract. That savings funded additional expansion for what it was costing us for the support and maintenance contracts on old solution."

"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."

"We are able to dynamically grow storage at a lower cost. We can repurpose hardware and buy commodity hardware. There is a huge cost savings, on average $100,000 a year compared to traditional storage for what we have at our size."

"The pricing model is great and makes sense. We have talked about how to get into more of a frequent billing cycle than once a year. That would be an interesting concept to add into the product, having the ability to have monthly billing instead of having to do a one-year licensing renewal. However, the way the license works by charging for storage consumed is definitely what makes them the most competitive."

"COST_SAVING; We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative."

"Dollar per gigabyte, it costs us more because we are storing more. However, if you look at it from a cost per gigabyte perspective, we have dropped our costs significantly."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

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.

See all answers

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

The product cost is affordable. It was not very high and not too cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

As the product is used for basic purposes, there are not many areas in the tool that require improvement. The product is just fine for now. My company does not use many of the features of the produ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

Dell ECS vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 10% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

MinIO vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 58% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 19% of the time

Dell ECS vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 19% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs SwiftStack [EOL]

Compared 4% of the time

More SwiftStack [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

September 2024

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Buyer's Guide

SwiftStack [EOL]

August 2024

Download SwiftStack [EOL] product report

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

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Dell Technologies

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NVIDIA

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."

SwiftStack focuses on handling large-scale unstructured data, providing software-defined storage, and boosting data scalability and durability.

SwiftStack is known for its proficiency in object storage, seamless workflow integration, and robust support for multi-cloud environments. Its architecture ensures high-performance data access, making it ideal for big data analytics, media asset management, and backup tasks. Users value its flexibility, ease of integration, and strong performance. The solution's high availability and efficient storage capabilities contribute to its strengths. However, areas needing improvement include customer support response time, initial setup guidance, and enhanced scalability during high-demand periods.

What are SwiftStack's Most Important Features?

Robust Scalability: Easily manages growing data volumes
Multi-cloud Support: Seamless integration across cloud environments
Seamless Data Management: Efficiently handles large datasets
High Availability: Ensures data is accessible whenever needed
Open-Source: Customizable and flexible with extensive API support

What Benefits Should Users Look For?

Enhanced Performance: Handles demanding workloads efficiently
Easy Integration: Adapts well with existing systems and workflows
High Durability: Ensures long-term data storage and protection
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces overall storage costs
Scalability: Grows with organizational needs

In industries like media management and big data analytics, SwiftStack’s capabilities in high-performance data access and multi-cloud support facilitate efficient data handling. Backup and archival solutions also benefit from its robust storage and high availability features.

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,

Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. SwiftStack [EOL]

September 2024

Free Report: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. SwiftStack [EOL]

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. SwiftStack [EOL] and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.

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