Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

We use the solution to store camera video surveillance and hospital X-rays.

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

It would be good to have synchronized mirroring between two clusters without using a third-party program.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for three years.

The solution's stability is really good, and I haven't had a crash for two years. The solution works just fine even if a node goes down.

The solution's scalability is very good, and you can easily scale it.

Sometimes, the support team throws me around before I talk to the right person. However, the situation has been much better for the past year.

Positive

Our customers previously used NetApp. They switched to Dell PowerScale because it was easy to use. In my opinion, Dell PowerScale is better than NetApp because it's faster and more hybrid.

The solution's initial setup is easy for me because it's been the same implementation from the beginning. However, it's not so easy when the customers do it themselves.

The solution reduces our customers' power consumption by around 30% and saves them rack space.

The solution's ability to interface with AI models and algorithms is very good.

The solution has been really good for helping our organization manage and run our storage from any location.

The solution has helped to reduce or eliminate data silos, which has enabled our customers to add new nodes by themselves.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected has been really good.

I've deployed Dell PowerScale for 300 terabytes to about 800 terabytes sized environments.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We have to deal with a lot of data, be able to get it across to and from different locations, and be able to store it. We use this solution for these purposes.

Overall, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has made the management of the data and networks easier. Because we are using the same solution for multiple platforms, our personnel have become more efficient.

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.

PowerScale's cybersecurity, including ransom protection, is very good. We've never had an issue with it.

This solution has helped free up employees to focus on other business priorities.

Data storage performance needs to be improved.

We've been using this solution for several years.

It's been very stable.

I would give technical support a ten out of ten. We generally don't need a lot of technical support unless something breaks.

Positive

We previously used another Dell product, and we switched because it became outdated.

Deployment usually takes about three to four months. We implemented it one network at a time.

Maintenance-wise, it requires standard stinging and patching to ensure that security is followed.

We haven't lost any data, and that's probably the biggest return on investment, being able to maintain data integrity.

A technical solution has to meet the requirements, and you have to know what you need in order to figure out what tool is going to best work for that.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a good product. It does the job, and it takes care of the data. I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use the solution to store all our unstructured data.

The solution's most valuable features are scalability and flexibility. It allows us to scale storage capacity without downtime.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a little bit pricey, and its pricing could be improved.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for two years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Around 30,000 users use the solution daily in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution’s initial setup ten out of ten.

The solution's deployment process is pretty extensive. It has a dedicated back-end network and then connects to the data center network on the front end. The solution can be deployed in a few days. Dell services did the deployment for us.

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

I am using the latest version of the solution. We partner with many third-party software products that can be used for different types of data replication. I would have users analyze their data and put as much of it on Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as they can. The solution stores all the unstructured data related to all my projects. It's the core of our data center.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the solution for unstructured data storage.

The solution has centralized file storage at the scale it does that.

The solution is a complete package, but its most valuable feature is the DR capabilities replication.

I would like to see PowerScale become a multi-site active-active solution. I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities.

I've used the solution for at least six years now.

Based on the last three years, I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten. The stability has been very good.

I rate PowerScale's scalability an eight out of ten.

Before PowerScale, I more or less just used Windows file servers.

The initial setup is moderately easy.

I have seen a return on investment.

Our company finds the pricing high, but it decreases over time.

We looked at NetApp.

My advice before choosing PowerScale is to take training up front on it because it has a lot of capabilities. Do some good training before you try to deploy it. I rate PowerScale an eight 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 use this solution to manage large data sets. It makes it easy for us to consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform for easier manageability. This means we only need to manage a minimal number of clusters. 

The solution is very flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. It scales well with different performance node types. In terms of data protection, it replicates easily with the replication features of SyncIQ. 

We have multiple clusters across two data centers and have two main teams; our enterprise storage services team, and our HPC team who recently purchased a bunch of capacity from Iceland.

When it comes to PowerScale Cybersecurity and ransomware protection, we use a third-party solution called Superna. It is still important to us that PowerScale helps secure our data from cyber attacks. An attack can happen very quickly and be very damaging. Large data sets are difficult to protect, replicate and recover.  

Using this solution, provisioning is a lot easier because we have large capacity clusters and can easily provide storage space to users as needed. We realized the benefits of this solution shortly after deployment. The management of the solution is very easy. 

This solution has had a positive effect on our company's storage efficiency. We are able to add capacity as needed in order to scale.

The ease of use of this solution has been the most valuable aspect as well as the SyncIQ and snapshot features. 

It assists with eliminating storage silos because it provides SMB and NFS protocols. PowerScale has also helped free up our employee's time to focus on other business priorities. 

I'd like to see more Iceland products in the cloud so that we can port our data into different environments if needed. I would also like to see a virtual appliance or software-defined Iceland product.

Version upgrades and patches take a long time to complete. This could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for twelve years. 

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution from a file data perspective. Scalability can be more difficult because you need three nodes minimum to start a cluster. You need a lot of other hardware to provide that service. This solution is not scalable in the cloud.

 I would rate the support for this solution a seven out of ten. The quality of support depends on the agent you deal with. 

Neutral

We have used other solutions but Iceland is the storage platform of choice for the large data sets that we have. We have a very strong relationship with Dell and their support is very good so we were very comfortable choosing Iceland.

The initial setup is straightforward. Dell came in to install the solution and update the operating systems. After that, some administration and management tasks needed to be completed, and then the setup was complete. 

Pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

This solution scales very easily. You just need to be aware of how much you scale as this can complicate the management of the solution. Scaling requires a strategy. 

PowerScale is easy to manage but more difficult to maintain. This is because it is a multiple node environment and the larger you get, the longer it takes. There are more risks when you make a change.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use it for storage in a scale-out data processing system.

It is a physical storage platform. We have several different nodes that all act as one large storage cluster.

PowerScale has allowed us to bring data acquisition and some of the initial data processing that we would typically do in the field here on-premise. That has let us speed things up from a data delivery standpoint. 

It has let us really optimize our consistency. We've been able to take something that several different people were doing out in the field and just maintain it here with one person able to do a really good job of making sure that our data quality is very high and that our consistency in processing is a lot more static. It has prevented quite a few possible issues, which has also allowed us to expand from some of our jobs, where we used to go and acquire this data in the field. The systems out there have three servers, and we're able to expand up to 10 or 12 servers all processing that data. Therefore, it's made our turnaround on data pretty quick.

PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It makes it to where we don't have to have a full-time storage guy on-premise. We are able to manage our storage on PowerScale without needing to have a team. 

The solution does provide us the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. However, that is not something that we typically do, as we have a fairly large cluster. We did have one instance where we had a very large job that was going to require about two petabytes of data. We were able to purchase that and get it installed pretty quickly, which definitely helped us out.

It is simple to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. We have almost three and a half petabytes, and it's a very low impact to our team as far as the amount of effort and babysitting that we have to do on it. This has really changed the way our company can acquire and process data in the field, allowing us to differentiate ourselves against all our competitors. None of the other competitors in our market are able to handle jobs, either in the size or density that we have been able to do so far.

PowerScale allows us to focus on data management, rather than storage management, getting the most of our data. This is mainly because the system almost manages itself. Instead of having to sit and handle storage volumes, RAID groups, LUNs, or things that in traditional storage architecture our group would have to manage, we are able to just create shares. The end user side is able to access those shares just like they would any regular storage or file server. That really helped us make sure that we're not having to manage storage the way we would with a traditional block storage or any other storage that we've tried so far.

It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door.

It has the ability to access the file system from multiple hardware platforms from a client perspective. We have Linux and Windows machines able to access the same file system, then we also have the ability for all those systems to be able to access the same data at pretty much the same time. That helps us quite a bit, as it lets us expand the number of processing nodes that we can use to access the data at the same time. This helps us to scale out the front-end data processing to speed things up quite a bit.

We do have some of the policy-based tiering that seems to be working fairly well.

As far as we can tell, it does a really good job of maximizing storage utilization. For us, the storage protection is a bit more important. The protection schemes that we have seen so far have been very effective at ensuring that our data is protected, while still being able to access as much as possible. That is one of the strengths of the OneFS software.

It definitely helps us maximize the value of our data. We don't necessarily try to get any insights into it other than we just acquire the data and process it on our client's behalf.

We have been able to consolidate and centralize our systems into one system. It lets us take data from the field and get it in one spot, where it can get quite a bit bigger. It also has a lot more processing systems to access our data and get it out the door a lot faster.

Simplify where you can. If you have a need for tiering, then that can be okay, but it can behave in ways that you may not expect. If it's at all possible to simplify and stick with one node type, your consistency will definitely stand up a little better. If you do have a workload where tiering makes sense, PowerScale does do a good job of that. That's the only real, "Gotcha," that we've run into.

We are probably on our seventh or eighth year of using PowerScale now.

We have had a few issues here lately, as far as power and kind of unusual things in the building. We've been really surprised that PowerScale was able to work around those issues without any sort of data loss, when we have had multiple nodes go offline. After we got everything back online and running again, PowerScale worked without any issues. As far as resiliency and availability go, I am happy with the solution.

PowerScale lets us scale into much larger projects than we have ever been able to do. As far as I know, that is actually what sets us apart from our competition, as they aren't able to do projects as big, dense, or high resolution as what we are able to do.

We didn't have any storage administrators previously. However, from what we've seen on other systems, they would require them. Without growing our staff or expanding, we have been able to just bring this solution on without a lot of impact to the staff that we already had.

We have a small number of actual people using it. It's mostly just different computers accessing it. We have anywhere from 60 to 200 different computers accessing it at any given time. We have a small compute cluster that sort of skews the numbers into that 200 range. Right now, we have 95 connections going into it across our different systems.

We have had no issues at all with our technical and customer support. The product watches after itself. If there is a hard drive replacement or anything like that, it phones home and Dell EMC lets us know. So far, we have had good luck getting equipment out and getting service on anything that we've needed.

With all the other file systems that I have worked on in the past, if you had the three point four petabytes that we have right now, then that would require at least two people to work on them in a mostly full-time capacity. Because of the PowerScale's simplicity, we're able to just let our infrastructure team manage it, and it's a really low impact to them. Right now, we've two people who manage it along with all the other storage and networking that we have on-premise.

We have added a node to the solution. We added 12 of the H500 nodes to our cluster about a year and a half to two years ago. The process was really painless. We just physically installed the hardware, so rack it and stack it up, then make sure the hard drives are in place and the network connectivity is there. Once we started powering them on, we were able to quickly add them into the cluster, and the extra storage and performance were apparent very quickly.

The initial set up was straightforward. It was similar to adding the hardware where we just kind of rack and stack and get the back-end and front-end networking configured, then we have pretty much everything right there.

The initial deployment was a lot smaller. It only took a day to a day and a half before we got it going. It was only a 300 terabyte cluster at that point. 

Our vendor helped us out with the deployment, so they were able to send one or two of their engineers (depending on whether it was the addition or initial deployment). One person can do it, but two or three people will help get it done pretty quickly.

I think we have seen ROI.

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. 

It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems. I do think it's worth the value, but it's definitely not cheap.

We were looking at large scale storage platforms. We had a good relationship with our storage vendor who recommended this solution. So, we took a look at it and did a bit of a demo, working with our software vendor to ensure everything was working fine, then just went out to the races at that point.

We did not evaluate other options in a side-by-side comparison. We did look at a handful of other vendors. However, we were able to tell just by the specifications of what they had that they weren't really going to work for what we needed. We needed to be able to scale the storage quickly, and also have Windows and Linux access to the same data set.

It was critical for us that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large. That was one of the things that really cemented that decision for us to go with PowerScale. We started out with the 300 terabyte system and were pretty sure at the time that the jobs that we were working on were going to get quite a bit larger and would need to have more crews acquiring that data. We were really planning on being able to grow this solution right from the get-go.

The people whom we have talked to about large-scale storage have typically rolled their own with either Ceph or Gluster. However, those require two or three full-time staff which we are not going to be able support.

We have been really happy with it. It is one of the few areas in IT that we don't have a headache. We've liked everything that we have used so far with it. We have been very happy with the feature set that it has right now. It's definitely serving our needs.

We have been using the solution since version 7. It fits our use case without us having to add new features on our side. I don't know that we have necessarily seen or needed very many of the features that they have added.

We have the ability to grow or speed up our cluster easily by adding or replacing new nodes. That makes me pretty confident that if we have a significant change in our data, whether it's the number of crews that we have or number of client servers that we need to deploy, then I'm very confident that PowerScale can handle it.

The solution provides file-based access for everyone. It's a simplified platform for user-based access to files. It's also very simple to do data center replication for disaster recovery with Isilon.

It's hard to think back to the beginning when we actually got it and how it helped us improve. Of course, it is leaps and bounds over any Windows-based file share that may have existed back in the early 2000s. However, it's really helped engineers manage and maintain it. It's a very simple platform to work with.

The file-based dumping for SQL backups is great. We use that fairly heavily, especially with the flash-based nodes on Isilon. It's been our go-to platform for user-based file access.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is great. We integrate and have Avamar-based backups with Isilon. The protection is great.

Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center.

Cyber security, including ransom protection, is good. We haven't really leveraged a lot of those features as we should. We know that they're there and we work with our partners to help us implement those pieces for us.

The impact PowerScale has had on our organization's storage efficiency is positive. It's tough to talk about efficiency, as we love using it and we dump everything into it. What it retains gives us a great DD compression on the array. We find ourselves overusing it, however, we do have it plugged into Cloud IQ. That helps us with alerts to let us know when we're getting close to our thresholds for capacity.

PowerScale has helped us free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. They're not spending a lot of their time managing user files. Everything's managed from the array itself.

PowerScale helped reduce our overall risk. It helped us reduce our overall risk mainly due to the fact that we're replicating between data centers. We don't have to worry about a single point of failure within our data center. I can check on the health of our arrays really at any time with CloudIQ, and everybody sleeps better at night.

If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal. They have immutable snaps that they can leverage, however, it would be nice to have something folded in with CyberSense where we could detect points in time when we need to do recovery for anything that may be compromised.

We've had Isilon for many generations. I'd say we've used it for the last eight to ten years.

We have had issues with internal load balancing between some of the shelves. That is an ongoing issue that support is trying to address. We're still waiting on a resolution for that, but that's really been our only issue with the stack that we have.

We haven't had any issues with technical support.

Positive

In terms of what we used before, I can't remember that far back. If we did it was probably some sort of Windows-based file share that was all manual controls. It's hard to compare what we used in the past as we did not switch from another vendor.

I was not directly involved with the initial development of the solution. My involvement was just the management of the storage engineers managing the system. We like to keep everything in the Dell ecosystem so it was easy enough for us to turn it over to the storage engineers.

It wasn't complex at all. Even the upgrades and controllers that we've done have been pretty straightforward, however, we've got two guys today that manage the environment.

It's deployed across two data centers.

The solution does require maintenance. We do continuous controller updates and the like, however, we do it in conjunction with support.

We have seen ROI, however, it's tough to compare since we haven't really looked at other platforms. It's been easier for us to use the platform we have.

The price is reasonable. The ease of use with the array and the functions that we get from it still seems to be better than other products that are on the market today.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's still great, however, there are some internal issues that need to be resolved. That said, I understand it's always under continuous development.

I would advise potential users to not focus on the price tag right away. I know there are other cheaper solutions, however, they may not have the functionality that Isilon has and the same tie-ins that you'll get with the Dell ecosystem with features like Data Domain and Avamar, et cetera.