Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

I use the solution in my company for large files. With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), the amount of files my company deals with is humungous in size.

My company has only four people working on the Dell PowerScale (Isilon) platform, which has around 300 TB. With the number of people necessary to run the tool, I am not sure if it can be considered an effective product.

The most valuable features are high density and scalability. The high density and scalability features are important for my company since we are trying to have low electricity and power consumption, considering that the amount of data that we have to use is limited.

My company uses an on-premises deployment model for Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

No one is required to maintain the product, but since it is a huge platform in our company's environment, some things need to be replaced constantly. The aforementioned issues with the tool are not because the product or hardware is bad but something that happens since it functions in a large environment.

If I consider my assessment of Dell PowerScale's ability to interface with AI models and algorithms, I would say that my company has just started using AI after connecting it to the tool. I use the AI part a lot currently. So far, my company has only been using NFS to connect to our computers.

It can be difficult to assess the ability of Dell PowerScale to help our company manage and run its storage from any location since it is a huge platform. You can put the product anywhere, but I would say that it needs to be in big data centers. You can have one location or ten locations, but all of them need to be big locations. You can't put the product into a small office area. It is easy to manage the product from multiple locations. Generally, one can manage all locations using the product from a single point.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has helped a little to reduce or eliminate data silos, but all the silos we use in our company are huge, making it a hard process. My company needs to deal with silos anyways.

In terms of the flexibility of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for supporting various data workloads, while keeping them protected, I would say everything is good since they can scale up very fast with NVMe technology and disks and also with the archive data in disks along with the performance it offers. For protection, we use snapshots along with mirroring.

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.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for seven years. My company is a customer of Dell.

The stability and reliability of the product are good. My company has only faced two big errors stopping the production in our organization over a span of seven years.

During the installation phase, Dell's support services are top-notch. I rate the technical support a six or seven out of ten. The support services during the tool's installation phase can be rated as ten out of ten.

Positive

My experience with the product's deployment phase has been good.

The installation took two days for three racks, and going from zero to one hundred, it took two days. It is a simple step-by-step process that includes the physical installation and configuration. Our company is able to be up and running within two or three days.

Compared to the other vendors in the market, the setup phase of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is fast. Other products are difficult to handle when it comes to the setup process. It is actually the technology like SAN and other related technologies that make it harder for a person to deal with the setup process.

My company opts for a 50-50 approach, meaning we take help from Dell's experts and from our own employees.

Considering my position at the company, I would say that we do not indulge in backtracking of anything associated with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

It is easy for my company to deal with product costs and licensing. Dealing with the product costs and licensing areas is getting easier since Dell is simplifying the licensing process and licensing packages offered to users.

My company uses products from multiple vendors all the time. My company is required to deal with multiple vendors, so sometimes we use Dell and others.

If I compare Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to other vendors in terms of both pros and cons, I would say that its pros are associated with the high scalability, where it is possible for one to build it in a very huge and large manner, but that has been so from ten years ago. Now, other vendors are coming out with good scalability features. I am soon going to have a one-on-one session later this week with Dell's experts.

I don't envision the future of our company's containerized solutions in terms of cloud integration since it is not applicable as we don't use the cloud, but we do use containers.

Based on key factors and the decision-making process, my company only uses the on-premises environment for our containerized applications.

I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

We’re the world-leaders in webcam technology, content, and services. We do high-resolution imaging from cameras. We have millions of camera images a month coming into our network from our systems in the field. We store all of that image data, and then we edit those images into time-lapse movies.

We've had an 82 percent reduction in our systems administration resources.

One of the things we have also noticed is about a 20 percent reduction in our video processing time. Our video editors are able to work on editing natively, on the system, and that cuts down on a lot of time that was required to move data around. It helps their workflow. 

It's also giving us double the capacity in less space. We get about 26 times greater density, compared to our previous storage systems.

In addition, Dell EMC keeps adding new features and improving on existing ones. When upgrading from the old generation, the redundancy was restructured with the domains and different node schemes, giving us more fault tolerance.

In terms of flexibility, we have two different types of nodes, and we're able to change the performance on directories, depending on the usage. It allows us to manage the entire system without having to worry about specific LUNs. It literally takes me just a few minutes to configure something and apply it.

As we expand and have to add new things to our product line, we're able to scale very well, because we have visibility on our storage, our capacity, and our needs. It has definitely helped us from a business standpoint in that we don't have to be concerned about our storage environment. We always know where we stand.

PowerScale has also helped us to eliminate data silos. Everything is consolidated and, as a result, it has simplified how we manage things and how much time we spend administering the system. With all our data in one place, we don't have to manage different types of storage systems. Everything is just a single brand. We do have different nodes, but they all get administered the same way, so we don't have to relearn different things, such as how to manage the RAIDs, RAID groups, and different protocols.

The solution has definitely freed up a lot of time. We used to spend a lot of time on our previous system. PowerScale allows us to focus on data management rather than storage management and helps us get the most out of our data.

The most important things for us are the reliability and the ability to cut down on our system administration resources. It's very easy to manage, and we have very good visibility on how the storage system is being utilized. In addition to the reliability, it's very easy to work with and it's very fast. Its sustained throughput is probably 100 times faster than previous systems.

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.

In addition, managing storage at the petabyte scale is very easy if you go through the user interface. Everything is there. But if we want to do more complex things, we can use the CLI. Since we're very familiar with Unix/Linux CLI we feel comfortable making configurations changes through there.

Another thing we particularly like is the documentation available, and how you can self-troubleshoot a lot of things. I like to know why something does not work and Dell EMC provides extensive documentation with technical details of bugs or technical shortcomings.

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.

We have been using PowerScale for over five years.

We have five nines of uptime, 99.999. We have almost no downtime with the system.

The scalability is great. You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to spread out the load. We've added multiple nodes to the system since deploying it. The process is pretty seamless, and we are able to do it with no downtime. It's a very easy process to do.

The fact that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large was one of the great things with this solution. With the other systems you could add "Bricks"—that's what they call them—but you had to set up LUNs, and we spent too much time managing that part of the system. Here, you just add it in and everything just scales up. Being able to add new nodes and increase the storage without having to redo the storage pool is great. That's one of the reasons we went with PowerScale. That was definitely a big selling point.

We're relying on it completely. I don't know if there's anything that we're not using it for. We're using it in production at full capacity.

We’re confident about the solution's ability to meet unpredictable future storage needs. I don't think there's been anything that we've needed so far that they haven't been able to accommodate. We're planning on staying with the platform for the future.

I've used their technical support a few times when I had certain random issues. Sometimes the issue was Windows-related. Even when they were not able to give me an answer immediately, three hours later, after researching things, they got back to me with the correct answer and technical details on why the issue was happening. To me, that's great. That's something our previous vendor wasn't doing.

I've been with the company for 20 years, and we have had various enterprise-level storage systems over those years, but the immediate predecessor was Pillar Data Systems. The primary reason we switched to PowerScale was its ability to handle the types of data that we manage. We have over a billion very small—one-megabyte to 24-megabyte files—that we are writing to the system continuously. It's an archival storage process and PowerScale was very suited for that type of environment.

What we needed was to simplify our entire system: to have higher throughput, more redundancy, and the ability to scale without having to recreate different storage pools or LUNs, like we were used to doing.

We went with PowerScale for the reliability, the scalability, and the ease of management. 

We had a lot of practice with the simulator, so once we actually had the hardware and the real system in here, we were already familiar with how to manage and do a lot of the configuration. That's something that is not available with other vendors or other systems.

Moving from the old storage, which was from another vendor, was a significant bottleneck and took months.

Upgrading from the older generation Isilon was seamless. We just plugged in the new generation nodes and told the OS to evacuate the data from the old nodes and the data migrated without downtime.

In terms of users of the system, on the management side it's our systems administration teams, so there are a handful of people involved. The people actually using the storage are our customers and our internal teams.

Techs from EMC came over and helped us with the physical implementation, while a remote team helped us with configuration and data migration. Our experience with them was good.

We would highly recommend PowerScale. We've been very happy with our overall experience.

We are using it for storage of video files, with casual access to them. We needed as much storage as we could get for the best price. If you are looking for a hybrid type of situation, when you want low latency for transactional things, and higher-latency storage for archival things, you can get the hybrid nodes.

Each of our two clusters has the same disk sizes, etc. We did that for interchangeability, in case we wanted to move shelves between the clusters. They act independently, but they replicate between the two. We love the system. That's why we continue to upgrade and buy it.

The low latency, the high-capacity connections that we have with the nodes, and the ability to add as needed to a particular system, are all important features for us.

It also handles data distribution among the nodes internally. You really don't have to do anything, so management is easy. If you're someone who really wants to get granular and know where every bit or byte is going, maybe it's not for you because I don't know if you can get that granular.

We have over a petabyte of storage and we've sliced it up. You can't really call them "shares" because it's not really like an NFS mount or CIFS share. But we've sliced it up and the policies and auditing on a particular system are, in fact, too much data. Anytime a file change or any system change happens on it, it records it and we ingest that into a SIEM. We can crunch it so we know who is changing what file at what time. That gives us auditing capabilities.

The policy-based management that we have, for who accesses what shares, is relatively simple to set up and manage. It's almost like managing an Active Directory file share.

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.

The OneFS file system is very simple and has an astronomical number of features that allow us to get very granular with permissions, policies, and archiving of data. It handles everything for you. It's one of the easiest storage solutions that we've ever implemented in the 12 years I've been working in this organization.

I also love the snapshot functionality. It's pretty much what everyone does in backup. It's a backup of your system, but it lets you set the frequency of the snapshots. That's very important to us because we take so many snapshots. That means we can recover up to six months back, if somebody makes a file change or deletes a file. It's like a versioning type of function. It probably isn't really special. A lot of backup software has it. But the snapshot functionality is what we utilize the most within the OneFS file system. In theory, you don't really have to back up your systems if you're taking snapshots.

The only problem with the WORM (write once, read many) feature is it does take up more space than if you just wrote a file, because it writes stuff twice. But it works for us for chain-of-custody scenarios, and it's built into the file system itself.

Also, on the PowerScale system, 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. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern. It's the secret sauce of protecting your data and that makes it a little disconcerting for someone who is used to seeing if a directory is using 5 MB of space. So if you have a directory using a terabyte of space, it might be using a little bit more because of the way that the system handles data protection. That is something you have to get used to.

Also, a lot of people are not used to the tagging or the description in the InsightIQ application. We're used to using the normal nomenclature of terabyte, petabyte, etc. They utilize TB byte and PB byte. So you have to understand the difference when InsightIQ is telling you how much storage you have. It's different than what we're used to. It uses base-2 and the world is used to base-10. Discerning how much storage you actually have, from the information in InsightIQ, takes a little bit of math, but it's not very difficult. I wish they had an interface in there where you could click and it would report in the way the industry is used to, which is in terabytes and petabytes. It's nothing major, just something you have to get used to when you're looking at it.

We have two clusters. We purchased our first cluster about seven or eight years ago. We've refreshed that particular cluster, where we traded in the old one and brought a whole new cluster. In the midst of that purchase, we also bought a second cluster where we replicate some files between the two. We just refreshed and upgraded that second cluster, which was probably about five or six years old, and bought a whole new set of A200 nodes for it, so the shelf sizes are the same.

We've had some bumps and bruises when buying new nodes and adding them to the cluster, but I don't think it was the technology that we really had the problems with. It was, unfortunately, Dell EMC support, where we got a couple of Dell EMC engineers who weren't as familiar with the system as we'd like. Once we kicked it up the chain, and we had an engineer that was more versed, they fixed the problem relatively fast.

When we had the first iteration of PowerScale seven years ago, we added nodes to that. This was how that process went: The node came in, it was already populated with drives, you slapped it in, put it into the rack, cabled it up to the networking, and put the networking on the same VLAN, the network backend configuration. Then, you went into the configuration manager, the OneFS file system and you told it about the node. You said, "I have a node that I want to join to the cluster." It brought the cluster in and, for lack of a better term, formatted it, added it to the array, and it was there. The amount of time it took to cable up and join that node was about two hours. Once it's there, the storage just expands.

In theory, and what we expected with the newer systems when adding nodes—and this is the way it does work, once they figured out the problem that they were having—was that it would be the same scenario. You rack the system. If you get the networking done right, which is really easy—you just drop it on—it handles a lot of the internal networking within the cluster itself, but you need to put it on the same external VLAN. If you do that right, the OneFS file system just finds it. You add it, and it just assimilates it into the cluster. Once the networking is done, it should take under an hour for it to get assimilated into the node and for the storage to become available.

Most of the problems we had were when we were adding on. We really haven't had any problems after it was up and running. When it's up and running, it's rock-solid. We never really get failures other than drives failing, because all SATA drives fail. But you just pull out a drive and you slap another one in.

We were using it for video storage and we were pretty impressed with its scale-up and scale-out abilities. We are always looking at the ability of a platform for scaling up and scaling out, especially because it's file storage. This was the best thing on the block that was out there.

In recent months, their backend technical support has waned a little bit. They need to address the first-line technical support. I used to have a lot of confidence in Dell EMC technical support, but since COVID—and maybe it's the COVID situation—the technical support has fallen short a little bit. We've run into some problems with them.

They stand behind their product. The support that I get from my support group and my enterprise management team is phenomenal. When there's a problem, they address it. It may take them a little bit of time, but they own up to it.

But calling in and getting that first-line technical support needs to be addressed. It's been a little bit of a "hunt and peck" when you have issues, as opposed to just coming up with the actual solution to a problem. That's only been the case in about the last nine months or a year. I continue with Dell EMC because when there's an issue, they back it up and they make it right.

It's one of the easiest things to configure. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

Initially, because in the first system that we had seven years ago the drive space was so small—I think they were 4 TB drives—there were a lot of shelves. We had over a petabyte of storage, so it was a lot of shelves. The installation, physically, was what took a really long time.

Now, the drive size is much bigger and the density per shelf is much greater. The actual shelf count is a lot smaller, so the physical racking is a lot easier. When we switched over to the new A200 nodes, we went from four nodes to one, four shelves to one shelf, when we did the conversion.

With the initial install, it has to format all the drives and that can take some time. It was a long time ago so I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I believe it took us a day or two to format all the drives. But we had 12 shelves. After that we were fine. 

But when you add on, it just brings them up and formats them into the array, relatively quickly. But the initial one, depending on how many singles you have, can take hours, and up into a day, to format everything.

The second installation that we did was a lot quicker. We stood it up, had those initial problems adding the nodes, but then we had to move it because we had to move data centers. When we moved it, it took less than half a day. We actually had to shut it down to move it out of a data center into another data center. We carried it over to the new data center, rack mounted it, fired the thing up, and it just took off like it hadn't even been moved. It handled a good "power-down" situation with no issues.

It was done with two guys from Dell EMC and one of my system engineers. The network guy did some backend configurations. The two guys from Dell EMC came because they were physically mounting all that stuff. When we added the second one they sent two guys, but one guy pretty much just sat around and did nothing while the other did the hands-on-the-keyboard stuff. I had a system guy down there to help with how we wanted it configured. But it's relatively simple.

Overall, the first deployment was phenomenal. Everything worked out great. The training, what they conveyed to us and walked us through, that was phenomenal. The second deployment, on the second array—same thing, when we were running with the older nodes.

Then when we did the transition where we swapped out to the A200 nodes. Once again, phenomenal, everything worked out great. When we got the A200 nodes for the second cluster and upgraded them, the installation of that went fine.

When we started adding shelves, that's when the technical support fell on its face because the individuals that were working with it were not well-versed enough. I guess they assumed—and it's how it should be—that when you add a node, it's just rack it and stack it and then turn it on. But it didn't go that easily. There was some low-level engineering trick that you needed to know about, and these particular individuals didn't know about it. They do now, because we had to escalate it. The escalation was a little frustrating because it took about two days to get to the right person. But that right person knew the answer in five minutes.

We did an analysis of using cloud storage and on-prem storage. We did a comparison of the total cost of ownership between the two. Every time we have done it, the cost of onsite storage using the PowerScale system is fractions of a penny, per gigabyte, compared to cloud storage. There are no access fees or access charges like you get with cloud storage. If you want to utilize cloud storage, there are retrieval costs sometimes. I know there are different levels of cloud storage where you can archive and then pull up, but it takes about a day to get them to pull that stuff out of archive, and then you can access it. But there's also those access charges. You don't get that with the PowerScale system.

We're at the A200 version, which is more for online archiving. It's storage-based, but they're called archive nodes. They're all SATA spinning disks. If you need a lot of storage at a cheap, economical price, and really high-speed, if you're not doing transactional stuff, they have these archive nodes. The PowerScale A200 is more like an online archival system where the nodes are there but you're actively addressing them. It stores them on spinning disk so you get tons of storage for a good price.

Networking can get a little confusing. The big thing is to make sure you carve out your VLANs to this particular system. Put a lot of thought into the network aspect of it. Don't just slap it into your server network. Carve out an isolated network for your storage subsystems and make sure they have high-speed paths back to wherever you're going to be accessing it from. Don't cheap out on that because this system scales out and scales up. If you start cheaping out on the network part of it, you're not going to be happy with your access to it. The biggest thing is to configure the networking right and give it the unabridged paths that it needs to realize the low-latency, scale-out aspect of the system itself. You can jam yourself up if you neglect the networking aspect of it.

The A2000 system they have now, which we didn't even look into, is more of a non-active archival type system. They also have these hybrid systems where you would have staging areas where you could store on spinning disks and tier. Your storage becomes a tiered storage infrastructure where you have spinning and flash storage. You can put your high access, low latency stuff on your flash storage, and your archival, higher latency stuff, on the spinning disks of the hybrid nodes. We were looking at that, but we're not using this particular system as a low latency, production-type system. 

They also have the all-flash arrays, which is where you're getting massive amounts of throughput but it's just expensive, obviously, because it's flash. It's a lot more money. We weren't looking into that because we did not need speed. We were just looking for storage options. We have a different Dell EMC product that we use for our day-to-day, low latency, server-based storage. That's where our block storage is. Our file storage is what we use the PowerScale for. We didn't want to go to the all-flash array nodes. They're not cheap and we already had a solution in place for that.

Overall, the hardware itself, and the OneFs file system, are the best selling points, combined with the delivery and the installation. That's why I continue to buy Dell EMC.

We had to move metadata from standard disks to SSDs because we had issues with how the cluster handled metadata operations. With a lot of IO, the data lookup wasn't fast enough, causing performance problems. This setup resolved those issues.

We no longer had the performance issues with Dell PowerScale. 

The platform performs really well. We're a media company with 14 TV stations. This solution is very capable of meeting our demands well. We use the SMB protocol for storage access, and it performs really well. 

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

We can get more than gigabit throughput from it. 

The disk failure handling could be better. We had a few issues because one disk failed, which slightly impacted the whole node, but overall, the performance is stable.

We had to expand and increase the storage capacity, but it turned out we needed a totally new cluster because we couldn't expand the current one due to software incompatibilities. We think the backend network should be upgraded from InfiniBand to Ethernet networking, and we had to buy a new cluster. Dell has significantly increased the prices of new nodes, by a lot. As a result, we're considering new vendors because if prices increase by 300%, then the clients will look elsewhere.

The disc server handling is not the best. Maybe the tiering logic could be improved. It's based on our age or some other logic but not on disk usage. If you have a tier one, you don’t want to load it completely; it deserves some free space for new data, and you can’t manage that with the current tiering logic. That’s where this software or this solution could be improved.

I have been using it for six years. 

PowerScale, which used to be known as Isilon, was developed by EMC before EMC became part of Dell.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten because the new nodes are not compatible with the overall brand. So, we don’t have the option to scale an old cluster. This is a limitation because I could increase the node numbers with the same version, and then it works seamlessly. However, maintaining different versions is not the best solution.

We had some issues with level 1 support. We had to fight with them on repeated issues. 

We asked them if they could escalate the support to a higher level. There is room for improvement in level 1 support. 

Neutral

I used an IBM storage solution with an IBM GPFS file system and Samba.

We switched to Dell because of performance issues we had with this setup, which were caused primarily by the Samba NAS solution. IBM now offers licensing for commercial SMB protocol implementation, and they are capable of providing a good solution for us.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy to set up. 

The deployment process took a couple of days. It’s an on-premise solution.

We had to integrate it with our Active Directory system, and we had to implement some additional schemas, but apart from that, it was a standard process.

It is a really expensive solution. I would rate the pricing a nine out of ten, with one being low price and ten being high price. 

From a technical point of view, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I would recommend using it. However, it's important to consider the high price point. Evaluate if you can get the same feature set from other vendors at a lower cost.

It was a good fit for the system that we put in, as far as the amount of secondary data that was going to be generated on our system. Not only did it have the capacity for everything, but it also had the scale-up and scale-out features. We needed expansion without having to reimage the system. The larger we scaled it out, the better IOP and the bandwidth. It checked all of the boxes in terms of what we really wanted to hit for a tier-two storage system.

I just heard my SME today say OneFS is the best feature of the whole solution. The continuum improvements that OneFS has kept within the industry and kept up with standards, the ease at which it can be deployed, and the ease at which it can be upgraded, all are key features of this system. 

A key feature that I love is scalability. I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node. It can be scaled up and out without taking my system down.

PowerScale helps consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform for easier manageability. As an example, I’d probably use the scenario of when I ingest data from a partner, and then I use the capabilities within Isilon to distribute the data across the other clusters in my enterprise. While we like to think that we're running an enterprise environment, their definition of enterprise and my definition of an enterprise are not the same. The idea here is, that I'm able to take in data from one organization at one cluster, and then use the smart features and the other features of Isilon, one of the best-operating systems, to redistribute that data to any other cluster that needs it.

The impact PowerScale had on our company's storage efficiency has been really good. I just recently saw a report on this a few weeks ago. We're actually doing really well as far as compression and deduplication go. We've over-bought compared to capacity based on the deduplication and compression that we're getting out of the system right now.

We really overbought on capacity. We have sites that are only 20% used. Then again, that goes back to the de-duplication and compression we're getting out of Isilon. They should be at 45% to 50% consumption at this point. The deduplication and compression, however, are working well. We're only using 20% of the capacity. I'll have a hard time when I go on a life cycle lease and I will have a very hard time convincing leadership that I still need the capacity. When they start reading and seeing these reports, it'll create a problem for me as I’ll have to justify it. However, to be clear, it's a good problem to have.

PowerScale has helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. We were able to do things like due diligence and research on InsightIQ and DataIQ and were able to do product comparisons while not having to worry about Isilon. It's freed up the cycles on those guys really well. I've got them to a point now where I'm cross-training them into Avamar.

PowerScale has helped reduce our overall risk in that it's dependable. The data is always going to be there. I don't have to worry about my end users. It has reduced risk across the entire enterprise.

In terms of PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection, considering the environment that we're in, I don't have to really worry about ransomware. That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable had Isilon-specific plugins. That's what I'm looking for. If Tenable had specific Isilon plugins, when they do compliance scans, that would be ideal. Right now, the only plugins being used are the BSD plugins. When they scan across Isilon, they come back with all kinds of security findings which are false positives that my team then has to go and chase down. As far as Isilon security is concerned, it’s lovely. As far as being able to prove it, it’s not so lovely. I don't know if there's a partnership between Tenable and Dell that maybe we can bridge the gap on that one.

A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, when you then try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code. The feature I'm looking for is in 9.3. If it's not going to be available to download, they should stop telling me about it.

We've used the solution for six years.

The stability is awesome. There are a few drives every now and again, however, with the product itself, we haven't had any issues with it.

Dell's support for PowerScale is awesome. It's probably, one of the best SEs that I've had in recent history is my PowerScale SE. If there's something I need or information that I'm looking for, I know exactly who to go to. They're really responsive. It's really cool.

Positive

This was a greenfield build. Isilon and PowerScale are what we put in from the very beginning.

I was not involved in the initial setup or deployment of this solution. My understanding is that it was pretty straightforward. We had a little bit of a rough spot when we went to do a OneFS upgrade, however, that's due to putting in hardening. When we had to back it off to do the upgrade, the hardening didn't back out as easily as it went in. That created some snafu and we ended up undoing all of the hardenings across the board. We created our own scripts to do it and it was much easier to manage.

When we deployed just PowerScale. Every PowerScale installment went with a complete stack, that included the switching, the server-side, the VMware, and everything that went along with building a stack. Isilon only occupied about three or four days' worth of a six-week installment period. It was pretty easy on a per-installation basis.

We've seen ROI in terms of time. We're also implementing the new version of vROps in which we can see the cost of our different applications, and how they use the different features.

From a time perspective, I have seen a return on investment in just the fact that I can take people now and redirect them to other products. I'm not going to reduce staff, however, I am going to redirect to other product lines. I have one guy that went from being our storage SME to probably one of my top guys, as far as VMware is concerned as well. It's worked out nicely.

The licensing is great. I'm not aware of the price point. As I was just telling my crew today that our job is to come up with solutions, not worry about the price. That's the management's problem to worry about the cost. If they don't like the cost, they'll come back and tell us to find another solution. Up to this point, I'd say the price point is okay.

We did evaluate other options. I couldn't say exactly which ones. I wasn't necessarily on the program when they did the evaluation, and therefore, I don't know what products were evaluated. That said, there was an evaluation period done.

In terms of versions, we have a mix of X410 and H500.

I’m not sure of the solution's flexibility for supporting various data workflows while keeping them protected. I would have to refer to my SME on that one. I don't really have feedback on that.

Speaking from a point where I don't know how much money we have invested, from productivity, stability, and ease of management perspective, I would absolutely 100% back it up every time. It's never provided a hiccup. Of all the components in our IT system, it's probably the least troublesome. It has been a workhorse and solid since the day we put it in.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

We are using Dell EMC PowerScale as a central storage for our virtual HPC infrastructure based on VMware.

We have several silos today, as our HPC infrastructure is typically divided between bare-metal and virtual configurations. The storage that we use on various infrastructures is different, as we are typically using a storage style that is different from any production facility. Until now the request from our internal users was to keep the data separated in different storage silos, and converging in central storage facility while on the virtual HPC is the new request. Therefore, we are experimenting how it works.

We have five nodes of F200s. 

This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use. Our administrators and people are very happy with the platform.

Now, our storage I/O performance is three times what we had before, even if we had not optimized the networking that is hosting the infrastructure. For this reason, our internal users are very happy.

We know how to deal with the OneFS system very well. 

It is easy to use and scale. It is probably the easiest, most scalable storage that we have ever used with our infrastructure. It improves the performance of our infrastructure. We have some other types of storage, but they are not as simple to use like PowerScale.

The ease of use and installation have cut the time of putting a new storage solution into production. This has been very useful for us.

Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us. I think that will be available next year.

We have been using it for less than a year. We just bought the platform in May, then we did a couple of months of testing. Now, it is in production. We bought the solution as soon as it was announced, but you have to take into account the time of the delivery and testing. With the pandemic, everything is unfortunately slower.

The stability of PowerScale is incredible. It's not so different from Isilon. PowerScale is a sort of Isilon on steroids. It has the same scalability and reliability of the Isilon platform, but now you have a lot of performance, so it is a sort of super Isilon from a customer usage point of view.

In the year that we have had it in production, the solution has demonstrated stability and performance. It is something that we rely on for our simulation infrastructure.

There is a team of three who maintain all the infrastructure for PoweScale. It is easy to manage as soon as you have it setup.

It scales seamlessly. We started three nodes, then we added two and there were no problems. The impressive part: Now creating or expanding a PowerScale cluster is almost immediate. In the past, you needed more time. 

As of today, we have around 15 research groups doing work on the platform, but we have only started the production phase after weeks of testing.

The technical support is perfect. We are more than satisfied. They are responsive with good turnaround times.

We have several Dell EMC solutions. We are familiar with their support and are more than happy with it.

For NFS and CIFS services, we used Isilon and now PowerScale. We have lengthy Isilon experience in our data center. Today, we have still a Dell EMC Isilon H600 hybrid in production, but we decide to go to PowerScale to host our simulation facility. Typically, the workloads in which we are hosting on our virtual HPC environment come from engineering and chemical simulations as well as the latest AI and deep learning workloads.

We were beta testers from the first platform of Isilon before it was acquired by Dell EMC. Its scalability, ease of use, and performance were key. When PowerScale came out, we didn't try to buy another platform for this kind of work.

We have been very satisfied with our Isilon experience as a centralized system for HPC. PowerScale is much better than the Isilon that we had before.

The platform is really straightforward to install and use, so we are not losing too much time setting up the storage as is and have more time to deal with the data on it.

The initial deployment took one day to set up. You do have to do some preparation for the setup, especially on the networking side. However, on the infrastructure, the platform is easy and straightforward to set up. The preparation was to prepare the networking, where you will be connecting the machines, such as, the typical networking configuration and VLANS, then you are ready to go.

It is immediate to add a new node and put that inside your configured cluster, e.g., when we installed the new PowerScale, the installation of the operating system was very quick. It was really unbelievable. We came from the first generation of Isilon where the installation of the operating system was not so fast. The F200 skyrockets onto the OneFS. Though, if we could afforded the F600, then that would be also faster. However, what we can afford is the F200, and we are happy now with that.

We have seen an improvement of performance without losing too much time when setting up the new platform.

We did the implementation ourselves with the help of the Dell EMC support team, who set up the system. One person, myself, took a half a day to set up the infrastructure and another day to install it, then putting the platform in production.

Our infrastructure is directly managed by us.

We have improved the performance and reliability of our HPC storage. We are very happy with it. Our systems are typically used for research. The added value is in the performance. Typically, it's not a problem saving money. It is more a problem of how much research you are able to do, how many jobs you're able to afford, and so on. In this sense, PowerScale, in our infrastructure, is really a winning piece. Today, we have three times the performance on the I/O. The gain that we have with the I/O is significant.

Isilon was an incredible return on investment. I think PowerScale will be the same because it's giving us the performance that we were looking for at an affordable price. 

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. 

We went for the traditional NFS and CIFS platform. We have also licensed the HDFS platform because we want to do something with the HDFS.

There are some new features, but we are not using all the features because you need licensing for all them. However, we are seeing that the platform is growing. At the end of the day, when we will need some more features, we will license some more of those features, knowing that they will have them.

The F600 machine of PowerScale is much better than what we have. It has MDM drives and 100 GB connection with the same software.

I know that you can license also some enterprise class features on the platform, but we are not using those features today.

I have a small team who analyzed the market, but it is difficult to find some competition for PowerScale with the same performance and price. Something that was important during our decision was you have to teach a technician the new platform, and maybe that takes time. In this case, the integration of the PowerScale was almost seamless for the infrastructure and internal technicians.

Apart from Isilon, we are using DDN. We also have some parallel side systems that we are using production with our HPC. However, PowerScale is really the easiest to use.

I would recommend going for this solution.

PowerScale is already at the edge of the technology. If you give a look at what you find on the market today from the technology point of view, PowerScale hardware and software are at the top.

80 percent of our operations are brands, especially for HPC, but our organization is moving to the cloud from some services.

We have discussed with Dell EMC their roadmap of the platform and are very interested in it. We hope we will be able to afford the new features that will come up, like the NVMe nodes.

We have some projects using the S3 protocol, but not on PowerScale. They are on the old Isilon for HDFS.

We use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. We have two platforms on the CloudIQ: PowerScale and PowerStore. We haven't use the platform yet so much that it has been useful. We have typically been users of InsightIQ software to monitor infrastructure. Now, we are using the CloudIQ, but do not much experience.

We are not thinking about using it as an enterprise platform. However, we do see increasing our usage over time.

I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.

We are using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for CCTV storage purposes.

In our scenarios, we haven't encountered difficulties. It is stable and very user-friendly. It's easy to monitor everything, and the interface is user-friendly. Additionally, it integrates easily with other systems. Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.

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.

I have around ten years of experience working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Dell PowerScale is very stable.

Dell PowerScale has high scalability.

Dell provides support within four hours, and they always fulfill their promises.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

Most enterprises prefer to go with Dell. Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.

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

We are using another Dell model for data replication, the SC5020.

Dell PowerScale is stable, user-friendly, and easily integrates with other systems. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it an eight out of ten. Better solutions are available, however, they tend to be more expensive.

Dell has the AI to protect the EMA.

We must write a script tailored to our specific use case whenever we upload an item, such as a file or an application, due to the demand for storing data for longer periods in cases of broken or corrupted files. With Dell PowerScale, data storage is reliable and secure. The system 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.

The solution is pretty scalable.

We used the traditional way, which made it challenging to expand storage and caused more issues.

If you have people working with MMC, Dell PowerScale is a solid option. It's a good choice for a company prioritizing decent pricing and reliable service. Dell PowerScale provides an effective solution for data storage needs, making it a valuable option.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.