Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

The solution's scalability is very good.

The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved. If you have a lot of nodes, for example, 15 nodes, and when you say you lost one node on the paper, the performance is not affected. However, if you have so much file count and fifteen nodes, losing one node really affects the performance. One of our customers had this issue.

Also, when you lose a couple of drives, it's a different structure, then you can lose data. It is clearer on the NetApp side, and you can create a rate group and a pool. So you will have more redundancy on the drives. For example, in a rate set for around 100 drives, you can lose around 20 drives, which depends on the configuration.

In NetApp, we will not lose data, but if you lose 20 drives in EMC, you will also lose data. Small systems like Dell PowerScale (Isilon) work perfectly with five, six, or ten nodes. Based on my experience, if you have 15 nodes in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and lose one node, it creates some problems.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for more than ten years.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a seven out of ten for stability. The solution's stability should be improved, especially for more than ten nodes.

If the customer doesn't need more performance, you should be able to adjust the solution to expand just the capacity and not the performance.

We recommend Dell PowerScale (Isilon) to customers who request low capacity but high performance. Each node in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has limited capacity, and we need to add more nodes, but we can get more performance. Adding more controllers to NetApp to expand the system and scale up reduces its price and performance.

For example, if the customer needs 200 terabytes of capacity with high performance and high throughput, we use Dell PowerScale (Isilon). If they need performance and capacity, then NetApp's price and performance are really good compared to Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy to implement.

NetApp's implementation, configuration, and integrations are easier than Dell PowerScale (Isilon). For Dell PowerScale (Isilon), you need to use the command prompt for some configurations and integrations; you cannot configure everything on the user interface.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution.

Users who want performance and have a budget can prefer Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Overall, I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a nine out of 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 Dell PowerScale for SMB-based storage and NFS-based storage.

Dell PowerScale allows us to consolidate multiple storage units into a single storage unit.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance.

The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for six months.

I rate Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten for stability.

I rate Dell PowerScale an eight out of ten for scalability.

We previously used NetApp. We switched to Dell PowerScale because NetApp's support was expensive, and we were looking for something more powerful and flexible. Dell PowerScale is the solution that meets our needs.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution's performance allowed us to shrink our workflow by about two times. We are a media and payment business. A lot of our workflows are video-based, and we store backups to a second system. With Dell PowerScale, we already see performance increases by almost twofold.

Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo.

Before choosing Dell PowerScale, we evaluated Qumulo and a new version of NetApp.

I suggest users talk to someone who has actually used Dell PowerScale and has experience with it. Dell PowerScale has a more integrated interface. Compared to the interfaces of the newer generations of storage like Qumulo, Dell PowerScale has a comparatively older-looking interface. Apart from that, the solution is fine.

Overall, I rate Dell PowerScale an eight 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.

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 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.