Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

Our motivation for investing in PowerScale was to provide scalable, redundant, and reliable storage for our film production pipelines. We're an animation film studio and our live data sits on it. Firstly, we were up to our capacity. We're a growing startup and we need to be able to scale into the future. The second reason we went with it is that we've got a relatively small IT team, so we needed equipment that's reliable and easy to manage. 

It's really set-and-forget. We went from our IT team from managing data, moving data, and deleting data on a day-to-day basis, over the course of six months to the point where, for the last 12 months, they have not had to touch it. It's really reliable, and the reporting heads off any issues that you might have.

In terms of the performance improvement, we've described it as moving from a single lane highway into a multi-lane freeway. We've still got speed limits in the individual end-user environment, but now more people can move at the same time without it throttling our system. One result is that on a local test we went from 61,000 milliseconds down to 5,500 on the PowerScale, which is a massive improvement. We have been able to leverage the features of the PowerScale to optimize that down, and that was while the pandemic was on, and we were moving from 100 percent on-premises, to 100 percent off-premises.

It has made a massive difference to how our IT team's time is utilized. It has pretty much been able to move from an operational focus, day-to-day, just keeping systems up in the environment, to now having an optimization mindset where they're looking to add new features to our production pipeline. They've got the time now to do that, whereas managing our storage before was a full-time job for them. It has saved me from having to hire one person over the last six months, and our IT team has gotten about 40 percent of its time back. It's a massive difference. We still have the same number of administrators as we had before, but it has allowed them to move from an operational focus to an optimization focus.

Before, we had disparate storage systems that we were managing separately, and now all our production storage sits within the one environment.

PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale.

It also provides the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud and that is one of the reasons we chose the solution. We haven't leveraged that as yet, we're not at that point, but we definitely invested in this asset for that reason. Currently, we can build two concurrent projects, but we expect, by leveraging that technology, that we will be able to get to six concurrent projects, which will have a huge business impact.

Another benefit is that it has allowed us to better understand our storage usage and cost over a project's duration, and that's helping us to better plan and quote for future productions.

We have started to leverage the data from InsightIQ to be informed when quoting for future productions, and we're getting a better understanding of our usage and costs over a project duration.

We've had Dell EMC PowerScale for 12 months.

We haven't had any issues at all. In fact, every day we say, "Oh my God, this is so amazing."

We haven't added a node to the solution yet. We plan on putting in A200s, as we move between productions in our franchise. It's a new product for our team, so we're still trying to optimize what we already have. We haven't really looked to use any of their new features.

We haven't scaled the solution yet, but the reason that we could convince the board to allow us to invest in this technology was the scalability. One of the next challenges that we're going to have is how to store our historical project data. We need a solution that is going to be cost-effective, yet the data will still have to be readily accessible to our current production pipeline. The PowerScale and file pool policies will enable us to utilize the archiving, so that will likely be the next way we scale.

We have found the post-installation support to be absolutely fantastic. They have helped us leverage the advanced features and that has hugely improved the performance of our custom applications that we have hosted on the PowerScale. Their tech support is great.

We didn't have a previous solution. We knew we needed a solution because every four to six weeks we were buying a new storage system. We had to make a decision on what to invest in. We reached out to our IT provider, Davichi, and they introduced us to the Dell EMC PowerScale. When we read up on it, it seemed to meet all our needs.

As a startup, we needed a technology that we could scale with. Secondly, we've got a small IT team, so the equipment needed to be reliable, easy to use, and there had to be additional support available when we needed it. We were also looking for additional features and options that we could leverage, like cross-platform support for SMB and NFS, because we were after a high-speed server and workstation access, because that was one of our pain points.

Dell EMC were incredibly attentive through the deployment process. They met us on site and they took the time to understand our current environment, our current challenges, and they worked with us to make sure that we bought the licenses that were going to meet our needs for today. They also helped us plan for the licensing that we'll need into the future.

They met with our tech team and spent a day with us mapping out what our requirements were, looking at our environment, and making sure that we had the right networking, so that our foundation was right when we put it in. They physically installed the equipment and they continued to work with us over the next two weeks, just to make sure that everything was right. We put the PowerScale in when we were in production, at the end of a film, and we had no downtime at all. That was a massive concern for us, doing it while we were live in production, but they helped us move all the data across to the new system and we had no downtime.

We have a local IT company that introduced us to Dell EMC and this product, and they were also a part of that scoping session. They're called Davichi Computer Services, and they're amazing. We ring if we have a problem, and within a few hours someone's out there. If they can't solve it over the phone or can't remote-in, they'll come on site and help us solve the problem. Fortunately, since we put this gear in, we haven't had many issues. But even as we were learning to understand this gear they worked hand-in-hand with our IT team.

On our side, the deployment required one person, our IT manager. Everyone uses it, as an end-user, in our organization because all the data for our film production pipeline lives on it.

The total cost of ownership has been definitely worthwhile, hands-down. I had forecast the need to hire another administrator for our tech team and I haven't needed to do that.

In addition, our IT team is now concentrating on things that help our business grow and help our business make money and help our team achieve a better end product; things we couldn't have done if we'd invested in other products.

In addition to the standard fees, we had to buy switches. In the scoping sessions, when Dell EMC came on site, we identified what the capacity was in our server room to put the product in. The only thing that we didn't scope for was that we needed an additional UPS because the UPS that we had couldn't hold the load.

The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it.

We looked at another Dell EMC solution. The reasons we went with PowerScale were the simplicity of managing it, the faster write performance than RAID systems, the data access optimization features, and, of course, it's fully redundant, with high performance, and it's scalable.

Make sure you take the time to understand your current environment and what additional infrastructure you might need to support the device. All that planning made it a seamless implementation for us. Sometimes that part of the process felt like it was taking forever, but it ended up being well worthwhile.

It's allowed us to consolidate everything in one, large, redundant volume, but we expected that. Nothing has gone wrong. Everything's been exactly what we expected, which is wonderful.

I imagine that as time goes it will become more valuable, particularly as we get into a world where we're managing archive data. And we are looking to explore the cloud options as well.

I would rate PowerScale at nine out of 10 because of the greatly increased performance, the capacity, reliability, and the improved maintainability of our storage.

We utilize Dell PowerScale for storing files as it is the sole solution that possesses advanced features that meet our customer's needs.

Dell PowerScale can be deployed on-prem and in the cloud but I prefer a Hybrid model and primarily use AWS, Azure, and Oracle.

The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features.

The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement.

I have been using Dell PowerScale for seven years.

I give Dell PowerScale a ten out of ten for stability.

I give Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team is responsive.

Positive

The initial setup is easy for an engineer. The time required for deployment, however, depends on the environment. If we're transferring data to existing infrastructure, a few hours should be enough. But if we're working with a new infrastructure, we must first fulfill certain requirements before we can migrate the data.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The price of the solution is high.

I give Dell PowerScale ten out of ten.

We are a Dell partner.

Many of our customers in the banking and parts sectors utilize Dell PowerScale.

Three to four engineers are required to maintain the Dell PowerScale.

I highly recommend Dell PowerScale.

We connected our mainframe system to Isilon. The NFS is being provisioned from Isilon and hosts millions of files. It is our primary storage solution. 

Isilon is flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. Dell continues to release updates and patches which enhance the use of this solution. This includes offering ransomware protection.

We are working with Dell to implement a cyber security solution, which is called the air gap solution. We also have Dell Data Domain systems. We back up the data from Isilon or any other system into Dell Data Domain. From Dell Data Domain, we offload to the air gap and secure the data into the air gap or Isilon. 

The system is robust. It has had a big impact on the efficiency of our organization. It serves as storage for our core application, which is a revenue-generating application. It plays a key role in our business. 

Isilon has the ability to scale file data, although we have not explored this within our business yet.

The offloading of data from Isilon to ECS object storage has been cost-effective.

Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated.

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer service for this solution is really good. We have a dedicated support account manager and system engineer from Dell who assists us when we need it. 

Positive

We do have another solution that we leverage for our NFS protocols. The other system is a little bit more efficient or robust. We also have protocols that we leverage on the other system. They are really good compared to Isilon.

The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use. 

I'm impressed by the way the system provides scalability. From an administration standpoint, it's really simple to use. The GUI and interface is easy to manage. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for high concurrency connection and data capacity.

It has improved our organization by filling a gap in some of our home-built applications. It provides a single unified space across the scalable infrastructure. There are no longer multiple points of entry required for the workload.

The recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression has drastically improved our efficiency ratios to make it an economical product. This solution has also had a positive impact on our employees' productivity because it reduces the amount of admin that our staff needs to handle.

PowerScale has helped us reduce our overall risk. We lean on the regulatory compliance and SCD drives to ensure data security. It offers various data multi-protocol capabilities. They recently introduced S3, as well as traditional file workloads including SNB, NFS, and SFTP. The security is built-in and includes SED and self-encrypting drives. This allows us to instantly monitor compliance.

The scalability of this solution has been most valuable. We have been able to start with a specified workload size and be able to double, triple, or tenfold it without having to change the environment.

The biggest weakness is small file handling. Small file compression options are not enabled out of the box. It would be good to have this enabled by default.

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. It offers multiple petabytes and tens of thousands of concurrent connections.

Other solutions that we have used have been administratively intensive.

We have been leveraging this platform and folding it into our application stack. This has removed the need for a third-party solution which has reduced overall costs and provided ROI. 

This solution requires maintenance. Once the platform is properly deployed, there is a BAU component of maintenance including the replacement of hard drives.

I have been really happy with this product. I have not seen other products in the marketplace that offers this stability and maturity. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

The solution is primarily used by companies with extremely large file systems to manage. They typically have one or two petabytes of files and usually a lot of videos as well.

The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature.

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

The price point would be too high for companies that don't need a very large amount of storage space.

The redundancy is a little bit expensive.

The solution is stable.

The solution can scale well. It has an automatic tiering system. You can have 60 petabytes of storage. The solution offers very powerful scaling.

The initial setup is not complex. However, if you're not dealing with it regularly, it could be complex. It has a moderate amount of difficulty.

Deployment takes about two weeks and you need two people to handle it.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

The solution is very good for file management, but not for other things.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The solution has helped improve our service, lower the running cost of the solution, and made it more scalable so we could address more customers at the same time.

We use the solution internally to support our own managed servers and run our own support center. From a business point of view, I like the way the solution cooperates.

Dell PowerScale works well to help our organization manage and run its storage from any location. We used to have systems at different locations, which required a lot of coordination. We made it work, but with the current solution, one guy can do the work that earlier required two or three full-time equivalents.

Dell PowerScale has helped us to reduce or eliminate data silos.

I rate the solution's flexibility a six out of seven for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected.

It did not really limit risk. It gives a lot of operational flexibility in a way that reduces risk because then the solution is better up to date every time you use it and is consistent across the different data sources. That's good and adds value, but we were already doing that in the old situation. Dell PowerScale just made it easier.

When envisioning the future of our containerized solutions in terms of cloud integration, we will adopt a hybrid strategy. Some of our customers are not able to move to the cloud, where we have to support them. We're following what the customer can do. In many cases, their initial transition into the cloud was not as successful as they thought. In the Dutch market, people are now a little more business-minded while looking into the cloud. That's why I believe that hybrid will be the way forward.

As an integrator, the needs of our customers drive our decision-making process when it comes to selecting a cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environment for containerized applications.

The pricing could be reduced.

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

Dell PowerScale is a stable solution, and not many escalations were brought to my notice.

The solution's technical support team is good, knowledgeable, and quick.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is bad and ten is good, I rate the solution's technical support seven and a half out of ten.

Neutral

I see a return on investment in that my people can do more for more customers in less time. The team now covers a larger number of customers than it did in the past, so I did not need to hire new staff for that.

Dell PowerScale clearly delivers what it promised to deliver.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have massive unstructured data. It's only used to keep up with our data growth.

Its scalability has been huge for us. Before that, we were using Windows File Servers and there were a lot of labor-intensive log-on activities to build all those servers. With Isilon, we just add nodes and grow capacity. We realized those benefits as soon as we had Isilon online.

We love the scalability with OneFS. It is a one-file system that just grows. It is able to keep up with our massive data and ingestion.

We don't use applications on Isilon, however, it manages the growth of our data and structured data.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is okay. It does the job. I didn't really think about it in terms of protection with its resiliency and its ability to grow.

It's important that PowerScale helps us secure data from cyber attacks, however, budgets control everything we do, so we can only use it as far as what our budget allows.

We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us and we'd love to have one.

We would like to see both performance and security improvements which are in all of the releases. We haven't leveraged S3 yet, however, at some point we're going to leverage S3. We're working towards the 9.0 releases. Therefore, we'd like to see some improvements in the protocols. 

I've been using the solution for five or six years.

OneFS seems very stable. I just wish support would get a little better. I realize with COVID 19 it's been hard to keep people.

The scalability is awesome, this is why we have it. 

There are challenges when providing economies of scale for a large cluster, however, it's nothing. It's hard to quantify that because it is just a cluster, but we've been pleased with the scalability overall.

In the past year, it hasn't been as great. They seem to just follow KBS. Prior to that, they were awesome. I'm hoping they get it together.

Negative

We just used Windows File Servers before Isilon. We didn't have any NAS to speak of. We might have used NetApp, however, that's not a scalable solution. We evaluated others and we chose Isilon.

It is very straightforward. It's a little complicated setting up, however, other than that, you just allocate file shares and maintain security patches, and management is easy. It's pretty similar to other systems. It's very straightforward once it's set up.

I deployed it myself. My implementation strategy was to just do it. I have a template that I modify for every deployment and I rack it a certain way so that we can manage the backend cabling, which is a really big deal. I rack it, set it up, and configure it.

We have it in our major data centers, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I do all the maintenance which includes dealing with failed hard drives. There are always errors popping up. I'm just keeping ahead of all the little things that come up, engaging with support, and so forth.

I did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. I did it myself. 

We have seen an ROI. For example, we don't build Windows File Servers anymore and that eliminates that labor. We have massive data growth and it helps us keep up with adding nodes. However, we have no quantitative numbers for that to share.

The pricing seems reasonable to me. We always evaluate new storage platforms and we've stuck with Isilon.

The costs involved purchasing the hardware licensing and extending maintenance. However, that's with every product.

We haven't really looked into PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection.

We have some Gen 5 and Gen 6 nodes, and we have five clusters. We just purchased the newer Gen 6, A3000, and H700 nodes in our Phoenix data center.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If there was better support I'd give it ten out of ten.

It's an awesome product. I'd advise others to evaluate all the products and just pick the one that's best for them.

Things are in the details and I've always paid attention to that, however, you have got to handle deployment carefully and think ahead to what could go wrong. If you do that, everything will be fine.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is mostly used for CCTV and unstructured data storage.

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

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit expensive compared to other products.

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

We have tried hybrid and all-flash nodes for both models. We can expand any of the nodes because there is lots of additional storage. We can also add accelerator nodes for increased performance.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for scalability.

The solution provides excellent enterprise support. There is a small delay with the L3 connection, which I hope will be resolved soon.

We have seen a return on investment with the hybrid model. However, we haven't seen a return on investment with the all-flash model because it is a bit more expensive than other products. It takes three to five years to see a return on investment with the solution.

I usually recommend this product for enterprise companies that require massive capacity. It is not for small and medium-sized businesses. The solution provides faster backup. I would recommend the solution to other users. We use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for long-term data retention. Dell is doing an excellent job of raising product awareness among partners and customers through advertisements.

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