Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

I use the solution in my company for unstructured data storage.

The most valuable features of the solution are Isilon InsightIQ for reporting issues and the extra ransomware protection features.

In my company, we have lots of huge amounts of data, around several petabytes, so we needed a way to have some responsive clusters with failover. In our company, we also have to give some reports to get some upgrades for the clusters recently as it is easier for us if we can give a look out to the management about how much research is done by us and how much space is required to do research. Our company has several tech people in our research facilities in Germany at the moment, and we have lost a lot of data to ransomware. One of the key features my company expects from the product is that it reduces ransomware attacks.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) offers a sense of resilience, cyber resiliency, and security to my organization, especially with the third-party add-ons.

In terms of the benefits we experienced from the use of the product, I would say that our organization has different researchers. In our company, we have every operating system in use for different workloads. I can imagine that when our company deals with file-sharing features, the tool is way easier to use, and we can perform the procedure smoothly. The tool is also easy to deploy.

In terms of my experience with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and its licensing part, cost of implementation, and costs of ownership, I don't have much information because our company has only been using the tool for over a year. The documentation is easy, and the management is easy and fast, so my company has had a really good experience with the tool.

The cost of ownership of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is good because our company is able to save a lot of energy, especially in terms of manpower and electricity. My company has managed to get down from four racks to half a rack.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has helped reduce and eliminate data silos, and it has helped our company shut down several single data storages. In our company, we had an old Dell PowerVault MD Storage, and through the PowerScale OneFS cluster, we could shut down a lot of network-attached storage devices. My company wants to consolidate everything into a central data storage and be able to manage our small team.

Based on the assessment of the tool's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected, I would say that we are in the process of migration. My company is in the process of migrating some video data and so on, but as of now, we use the product's services in the backend for containerization.

The product has helped reduce overall risk in my company since we just have one cluster to manage. Primarily, it is easier to have an overview and keep the clusters up to date.

When envisioning the future of our containerized solutions in terms of cloud integration, I see that in Germany considering a fully cloud-based approach can be hard. Mostly, Germans don't like to put any data on the cloud. I believe that users may opt for a private cloud or a hybrid strategy.

Based on a few key factors and the decision-making process, I would say that my company would choose an environment that offers the most amount of security features for our containerized applications since we have research data while sometimes, we also have data that is used for thesis, so there are areas where we can't afford anyone to get access to our data.

There are some missing features in the product, especially when our company needs to do some tape backup, and we see that the tool doesn't have integration capabilities. Our company has to buy another third-party software deal with tape backup. 

It is a little hard to implement Dell PowerScale CloudPools. In our company, we would like to have another storage tier for data access, but it is getting too expensive when it comes to the licensing part of the product.

Sometimes, it can be bothersome to get through from the first level of support to the second one and from the second level to the third level of support. To deal with a set of similar errors, it would be great if Dell could allow users to skip some support stages. The reason a user may be forced to go through different levels of support can be because there is no automated support available to be offered.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for over a year. My company is a customer of the tool.

My company has never had any issues with the stability of the product.

The product's scalability feature is super easy to use.

My company has used the technical support of the tool. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

My company deals with big companies that offer storage solutions. My company does not have similar products from different vendors, so we deal with different vendors and provide different solutions for different scenarios.

The product's initial setup phase was really easy because our company had technicians coming over. I feel the technicians could do better, and so now my company has a new support partner who installs the hardware. At the time our company purchased Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we had a third-party company install the product in our company. Our organization called in a third-party company to introduce us to how to install Dell PowerScale (Isilon). There were some issues after the tool's setup phase that had to be fixed, and so it got quite a little messy because of the aforementioned problems.

We received several good recommendations from partners of our organization in Germany, after which we dived into Dell PowerScale (Isilon), considering that my company is in the commercial research area, where we have to deal with contracts. My company believes that if we have contracts with Dell, then it would be easier for us to process data. The last time our company upgraded our compute, we entered into another contract with another vendor, which was not good. My company is looking into entering into more contracts with Dell.

Considering the product still needs to add a few features, I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

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.

I rely on Dell PowerScale to manage and store manufacturing data from NES systems. It is great for handling big data, offers scalability, and ensures data security, simplifying the storage and retrieval of manufacturing information.

The most valuable features of Dell PowerScale for its reliable performance and stability. The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice. It is a top pick for my customers due to these qualities.

There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage. While it excels in managing file systems, enhancing features for more efficient handling of objects could make it even better, ensuring faster and smoother operations.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale for ten years.

The technical support is very good. They are quite helpful.

The installation is quite simple and the deployment takes only a few hours. In my organization, we have a total of 26 system engineers, and among them, 11 are trained to handle Dell PowerScale. These engineers are responsible for installing, maintaining, and providing support for the product. We conduct maintenance regularly, typically with a focus on remote support, offering 24/7 assistance. For on-site support, our goal is to respond within four hours.

While customers often perceive it as expensive, I find that considering its functions and performance, Dell PowerScale is reasonably priced. I would rate it as a five out of ten in terms of costliness. In addition to the standard licensing fee, there are extra costs for services and additional solutions with Dell PowerScale. Services like maintenance and support may incur charges. Sub-solutions such as CloudIQ are also additional and may be charged based on usage or quota.

I would highly recommend Dell PowerScale to others. Overall, I would rate it as a nine 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 use the solution for NFS. 

Dell PowerScale's performance is good. 

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

I have been using the product for more than three years. 

Dell PowerScale is stable. 

My company has more than 1000 users for the solution, and it is scalable. 

Dell PowerScale's support is good. 

Positive

Dell PowerScale's deployment is complex. 

I rate Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten. 

TGen is a nonprofit biomedical research institute. Our focus is primarily on genomics, translating discoveries in the field of genomics into treatments for patients.

It is central to our data storage of scientific data. We sequence the human genomes of folks with different diseases, primarily cancer but also other disorders, e.g., rare childhood disorders and people with mitochondrial diseases as well as neurological diseases. When you do this, it generates a considerable amount of data. Each time that a whole genome sequence is run, you generate anywhere from four to eight terabytes of data. For example, if you are looking at 1,000 patients, that can be anywhere from four to eight petabytes of data. TGen has about seven petabytes of storage being used for storing these genomes, which is a fair amount.

Isilon is an on-prem, scale-out storage. The nodes are linked together through a back-end high-speed interconnect. 

We are running current versions of software on the node. It has versions now. The nomenclature is sometimes not the easiest to follow, because they still like to rebrand things. 

It has given us the capability to focus on our prime objective, which is science, without having to necessarily be concerned about the back-end infrastructure that powers it. This is something we are always looking to achieve: Being able to focus on our prime mission without having technology get in the way. Scientists don't want to learn all about your storage system. They just want to do their science.

It is a critical piece for storing scientific data for our Institute. It is where we put our most valuable and precious data. We also leverage it for work on administrative data, spreadsheets, Word documents, etc. So, it is flexible. We access it via NFS and SMB. Those are the two primary methods of access that we use along with some others, such as S3 for some particular use cases.

Deploying and managing storage at a petabyte scale using Isilon is extremely simple. The user interface for management tasks is intuitive. The documentation is thorough and good, and if you get stuck, then the support is very capable. Overall, I have confidence that we can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them.

PowerScale has helped us by consolidating the data without having it dispersed. Prior to this solution, we would have many different physically separate storage solutions. To do the science, sometimes data needs to go from one place to another. Moving your data at a petabyte scale, or even at hundreds of terabytes, is very time-consuming and expensive. By having the consolidation within these clusters, it has enabled us to very easily access and compute data without having to push it around to a bunch of different places.

We have a "thinly provisioned" workforce. One of the crucial aspects is that we can continue to scale a solution without having to add more humans to take care of it.

There is a reason that we chose this platform to store this priceless data. We know it is resilient. It also provides data protection that helps me sleep at night. 

One of the most important factors about it is you can manage a lot of storage without a lot of people. Therefore, ease of management is really important for us because we are a nonprofit. We don't have a huge IT staff to support a pretty substantial IT infrastructure. So, ease of management is always a really crucial consideration.

Another aspect of the management that is super important is having the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. We have four clusters that we manage. Having all those clusters, being able to have a single dashboard to take a look at the health of everything every morning, helps out a lot.

One of the nice things is that they have several different node types spread all the way from super high performance, flash-based storage nodes through more of what we consider an archive tier. So, we are able to use technologies, what Dell EMC has labeled SmartPools that will tier data automatically between different types of storage. So, we can ensure that hot data resides on the high-performance storage. Whereas, once data has gotten colder, then it can be pushed off to the low-performance storage to help control costs.

We have used the solution’s support for the S3 protocol, but in a limited use case. We are looking to expand that because we are doing more work towards cloud-based solutions. So, having the flexibility of S3 is important as we design new workloads that will be more cloud-centric. They will be able to use that protocol to access data on nodes without necessarily having to go back and refactor everything.

It is good and efficient when maximizing storage utilization. The operating system behind it, called OneFS, provides granularity, data protection, and control. So, you can actually adjust the amount of overhead being consumed for your data protection, depending upon what your needs are. It is pretty efficient at keeping data protected. At the end of the day, that is one of the most important things: Knowing that your data is safe.

Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution’s OneFS operating system. We have been iterating with them for quite some time. The solution is continually improving and becoming more robust and reliable. One of the latest things that really helped us out was the ability to perform upgrades without having cluster-wide outages, which is huge because we don't want to shut down operations unless we absolutely have to. Having that was a really big win for us. This saved us time. More importantly, it has kept our labs functioning during upgrades, as opposed to having shut down sequencers for a day while we go through and upgrade everything, which is important.

Something that still could be improved upon is adding additional node types of different sizes to facilitate a better way to run in distributed offices. For example, we have a lab up in Flagstaff, but they don't have a lot of IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is not really appropriate to run this system at their location. So, we run it down here in Phoenix. It would be nice if there was a smaller solution that we could deploy up there that was still as cost-effective as the bigger solutions.

The thing that they are working on now, and we are following closely is more native cloud integrations. The way that we envision workloads in the future is around moving compute to data instead of the other way around. So, we would like to have a single pane glass to manage storage across a variety of different platforms, including native cloud. That would be awesome.

We were using PowerScale before Dell EMC even bought Isilon. So, we have been using it for some time now. 

We have run this product for so many years now. I can count on one hand the number of times where we have had any kind of issue that impacted availability. Usually, it turned out not to be the cluster but something else. It is extremely robust and continues to function.

We are not super aggressive in patching or anything. We believe that stability is number one. Availability is just of the most critical importance so that is really where we focus.

Once you have set up your initial cluster, adding more capacity to it is extremely easy. It is so easy that one of our salespeople added a node to the cluster. Having a salesperson do something technical is always a little bit interesting, but they didn't have any problems at all. "Boom," and it works. 

This is one of the nice things that goes back to that whole ease of management. Being able to add additional capacity is pretty simple. You just buy the nodes and plug them in, as long as you have enough of the right kind of node types. However, if you meet all that criteria, it is that easy to do.

Since it can scale so easily, as long as I have money to buy more nodes, I can grow it as big as I need to. That is important in our business. As sequencing technologies continue to evolve, and as those technologies evolve, the amount of data generation never gets smaller. It just always seems to get bigger. This is one of the absolute key aspects: We can grow on demand without having to forklift stuff. 

I have done forklifting, and it is a drag. I don't want to do that again. We want to just keep being able to grow as we need to ensure our customers have the resources that they need to do their work.

I have worked pretty closely with their engineers over a number of years. They have implemented several different items that we have suggested.

The technical support is excellent. They have good support teams within Dell EMC, but also the VARs that we use have been extremely good at helping us as well. We kind of have multiple different angles of support, and that is one of the reasons that we continue to invest in Dell EMC. They have a model that we can rely on for getting the right answers.

I would rate the technical support as a nine out of 10, because nobody is perfect.

Positive

We got our first cluster in 2008. Before that, we were using JBODs connected to Linux hosts. This was a homegrown solution. Frankly, there wasn't really anything available at that time that could meet our needs which didn't cost millions of dollars. So, we went from something that was good enough to something that was much better.

We switched because we needed something that scaled much larger than what we could build and comfortably support. That was the number one reason. Number two was, at that time, I was still doing all the technical work, and I was the one building it. I had too many other things to do. So, I needed to find something that could be supported by other people, not just me. This was really getting something that we could run in a more enterprise-type fashion, as opposed to something that we built because we had to and there weren't any other options.

Today, we have two individuals responsible for storage. Not just this storage, but any other storage systems that exist. Previously, while the storage was a lot smaller, it still took about four of us working on it. By having a single platform, where we can run a variety of workloads on it, this enabled us to not have to continually grow our storage administration staff, even though our data footprint increased many fold over the years.

It was straightforward. There wasn't anything super complex about it. 

We just deployed a new cluster last year. It took around three to four months before it was really cranking in full production. Once they are running in full production, they are adding value.

Even to this day, if we still run into something that we are not sure about, we can call support or get local support, who generally get things addressed quickly and to our satisfaction.

Since I have to manage all the budgets, I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money.

Like anything else, it could always be less expensive. That would be great. At the same time, I would like to make sure that they keep innovating.

We went pretty much straight to the Isilon product. At the time, there were no other products available that did what that product did. They were kind of unique.

We keep going back to them even though there are other products now that report to have similar characteristics. We keep going back to them because it has been such a good experience. We have a high degree of confidence in Dell EMC being able to deliver a product that meets our needs. It is cost-effective and helps me sleep at night because a lot of the data is precious. Sometimes, you get samples that you would never be able to get again, where they are kind of a one-off thing. If you lose them, then they are gone forever. We have to bear that in mind. That is really why we continue to invest in this solution.

I would rate it as nine and a half out of 10. One of the main reasons that we have been successful as an institute is because we have back-end infrastructure, e.g., scale-out storage. This lets scientists focus on doing science, which is really important.

We're using 95% of data for user access and 5% percent for the NFS mount point. We're a startup and customer of Dell. 

It's helpful that we're able to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters. We started with a very small footprint and now we have 30 nodes and recently expanded an additional eight nodes on the cluster. We can create multiple storage pools from this if we decide to add a location within the cluster itself.

We're struggling to find the NIXI protocol. It's for people needing to access using Windows and Linux. We're struggling with the UID mapping and how to configure mapping-related things. I'm looking at how to map those GIDs and UIDs. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. If it's being used for the NAS protocol, it's very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

We have direct Dell support only.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have 4,000 users in the company who are accessing the shared drive without any problems. Maintenance can be done by one person. 

We have a five-year contract with Dell. We get new hardware each time we renew the contract and the cost is calculated on a percentage-wise and scalability basis. Every five years, we replace the tech nodes. 

If you're looking for a product to use for an assembly protocol, this is the best solution on the market.

I rate this product nine out of 10. 

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve the load distribution capability. For example, in some cases, the system load is not distributed automatically on all the nodes but is concentrated only on one. You have a peak request on only one node and the others don't do anything.

In an upcoming release, the solution should have security features embedded, not external software.

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

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a reliable solution.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is scalable. It is easy to expand capacity.

Most of our customers are enterprise-sized companies and the solution is suitable only for companies with a lot of data. For example, you can have a start-up company dealing with a large amount of data, but only have 10 people working on it. In this case, you will need a solution with this capability.

I am satisfied with the support.

If you have used the solution previously then the initial setup of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy, if not then it is difficult. If you have good planning and preparation then the implementation can take two to three days.

We do the implementation of this solution for our customers.

The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable.

My advice to others is they should work with a provider that knows the solution well and the features in order to implement it correctly.

This is a good solution but it is not always the best choice, it depends on the use case.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) an eight out of ten.