Dell PowerScale Reviews

My main use cases for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are file share and enterprise.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does not play a role in my company's AI initiatives at all.

I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could evolve with AI over time since it is definitely a landing place for a lot of the data, so I believe that is a use case for it.

The features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I appreciate the most include the scale of architecture and the way it is designed.

These features benefit my company by providing less downtime and less overhead.

While I have not calculated an exact number regarding the reduction in downtime, we have always been using the product, so we have no baseline to compare it to. However, it is a very good product.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) scales very well with the growing needs of my company.

I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) can be improved, as the cost models are quite expensive for administration. I believe addressing this will bring the product to market competitiveness with what is available.

The biggest return on investment from my point of view when using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it operates seamlessly. You bring it up and most of the time the customer does not even know it is running.

I did consider switching to other solutions while using Dell PowerScale (Isilon), but it was an established product and we wanted to keep our customers happy.

My role in using and managing Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that I am a traditional architect and storage administrator.

My company has approximately ten thousand employees.

I have advice to other companies that are considering Dell PowerScale (Isilon), though I need to think more about what specific recommendations to provide.

I rate this product 9.5 out of 10.

When we started using Dell PowerScale (Isilon), our primary use case was to have a general purpose file server, which can integrate with all of our domains or tenants, and in which we can provide SMB and NFS services because S3 was not part of it seven years back. The next case was to have data access between multiple tenants, so you authenticate one tenant and then write your data, and then you can authenticate from another tenant and get your data or read your data and do vice-versa.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory.

The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) certainly has room for improvement; since it does not provide SAN at the moment, I would look for Dell to create a complete unified solution just like NetApp. The missing protocol on Isilon is block storage accessible over NVMe, as Fibre Channel protocol is not the future anymore. Many users exploring options like NVMe would appreciate this integration. I'm not certain about backups, but many backup vendors are now offering D-NAS backups for taking snapshots of your file shares. Isilon currently does NDMP but could benefit from advancements in backup solutions.

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

In terms of stability and reliability, I would rate this a ten. The way we write our data on Dell PowerScale (Isilon) utilizes a protection plan that enables maintaining two to three blocks of your data across all nodes. Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues, and while there can be hardware failures, they are rare.

I would rate stability a ten because it is a very stable product.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is scalable; our first cluster had twelve nodes, and since we can mix and match our nodes, we currently have four clusters with hybrid nodes, which fits our performance and capacity needs.

I would rate the technical support at a seven. It was great earlier, but now, when we encounter issues, level one support often needs level two assistance. This delays the resolution process, which has led to perceived degradation in support quality, compared to the amazing support I received seven years back.

Positive

I set up Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for my organization from ground level up. We had a different tool at that time, which is called Arcserve, Arcserve RHA, and we decommissioned that tool and migrated all of its functionality over to Isilon.

My deployment experience with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not complex. When we first set up the cluster, we received help from professional services, who provided all environmental details, infrastructure, network tenants, user base, IP ranges, subnets, and more. Once we filled out a sheet with that information, they pre-configured the box for us and assisted via Zoom for setting everything up based on our needs. The setup process is quite smooth, and as we integrated more network tenants, the procedure remained straightforward.

The deployment time can vary; you have multiple dependencies with different teams, such as needing IP addresses or CIDR ranges from peer network teams. However, if your team has available resources and they can assist quickly, such as within a day or a few hours, it won't take much time to deploy.

The return on investment with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has been significant, but it depends on your use cases. For instance, if you create a share on AWS, AWS won't charge you until you pull your data out, and if your lab requirements are high, many companies prefer creating their lab environment on-premises instead of on AWS or other clouds, which is far cheaper. A similar environment on-premises can yield extraordinary savings, potentially more than fifty percent, because a single procurement of Isilon gives you three to four years of support and maintenance.

Regarding pricing, Isilon can be cost-efficient; if you are using more capacity nodes without needing more performance, it won't affect your budget much. However, multiple factors play a role in deciding the cost; are you going to be using replication or encryption? Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier. One more point to add is that if Isilon were to become software-defined, it would be a good option, because currently it is only hardware-based; you would buy hardware, set those up in your data center, and it is done. If Isilon were to be software-defined, users could create their own hardware and install Isilon's software on low-cost servers, which is not currently available.

When comparing Dell PowerScale (Isilon) with what is on the market, I can say the best competitor out there for Isilon is NetApp. NetApp does not provide you a spanned single file system architecture, so the file system will be only dedicated to a NetApp cluster. But the functionality will be the same, and people usually go for NetApp because it is a unified system; you can do multi-protocol, all sorts of storage protocols on NetApp. It provides you SAN, it provides you NAS, and it now provides you S3. However, it is a bit complex to manage—not very complex, but it is more complex than Isilon. Next is the upgrades; the upgrades are not pretty smooth for NetApp, and if anything goes bad during an upgrade, all your protocols and everything, all your systems will be affected. I am not sure about the costing feature because we evaluated Isilon and found it a perfect match. Plus, since you can map a single directory to multiple network tenants, you cannot do that on NetApp; you have to internally migrate the data from one directory to another that is respectively mapped to different network tenants. For example, if I have a network domain which is lab and I have another network tenant which is production, you can integrate a single Isilon hardware piece to both the domains, lab as well as prod, and you can easily restrict access to users in both network tenants without having to replicate the data.

Automation plays a role in our AI initiatives, as there are APIs available for Isilon. We have streamlined our footprint when it comes to the data center, so we do not entertain many requests on a regular day. Automation is available, and if we want to expand our footprint later, we will probably go with the automation piece, but at this point in time, we don't get many requests, so we don't want to spend more on creating automation rather than having people available for using it. However, automation is available, and you can also use your workloads on Grafana, allowing custom creation of your performance metrics.

To measure the success with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we look to the performance metrics and benchmarks we have established. For example, we previously had F-series nodes in our last cluster, which are high-performance nodes, meaning you can actually move your data from one node to another if the data is least used. Additionally, you can integrate Isilon with any other third-party or Dell product, creating a storage pool for dumping your backups. Performance-wise, our primary goal was general-purpose file shares for SMB and NFS, so we aim to ensure that users do not face any sort of latency. Latency varies; if the shares are mission-critical, they require fast access, while lab environments can accept some latency, but we do have certain response time numbers to consider. For example, users should not experience timeouts when accessing SMB shares or NFS shares, and the metrics for latency should be under a defined threshold, not beyond ten milliseconds or potentially fifteen or thirty milliseconds, depending on the workload.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) caters to all businesses, whether small, medium, or enterprise, because of the variety of nodes available.

I would recommend doing a proof of concept before implementing Dell PowerScale (Isilon), especially if an organization is migrating from an existing product. It is crucial to match the performance you are getting now with what Isilon is offering, considering your use cases. For example, we had to securely migrate PCI data to different network tenants, and Isilon allowed us to map directories to both lab and production, making it suitable for our needs. I give this product an overall review rating of ten.

One of the greatest use cases for Dell PowerScale for our studio is in virtual production, where we have many computers that are all running a single program across all of them. They all need to be tied together and basically accessing the same assets all at once. The usual way to do this is to have a copy of everything on each computer. The problem becomes when someone wants to make a change, for example a large change to it. Now that change has to persist across all of the different computers that are running the LED wall, and that takes time, time that productions do not have. By having Dell PowerScale, all of the computers can access the same piece of data all at once. So you change it once, it changes it everywhere all at once.

The biggest impact that Dell PowerScale has made for our business is in virtual production, where we have multiple media servers running an LED stage. In one case, we have 16 different servers running one very large, super high fidelity LED wall. When we are running something such as Unreal Engine, the basic way to do it is to have a copy of the project that you are putting up on the wall on every single computer, which works fine until you want to make a pretty big change. When you make that change, now that change has to be submitted across all of those computers, which takes time; it could be upwards of 45 minutes before you could be shooting again, and that is not something that you ever want to tell a producer. Now with Dell PowerScale, all of those computers, all of those media servers can access that one piece of data and change it one time, and they are all accessing the same file, so it immediately changes. That speed is something that no one else can offer, so it is huge for us.

At Orbital Studios, my role in using or managing Dell PowerScale is crucial. We need to have overkill for everything because productions do not want to be down for five minutes, which costs money. Our whole objective is to make sure that we are not the reason why production is slowed down. Features such as Dell PowerScale really help to make sure that we have the fastest speeds. We can iterate quickly. We can access all of the data that we need directly on all of our systems all at once. It is also a security measure for us because there is a level of security by having all that data on-site, on-premise, that a lot of our clients really want to have.

There are two things that we love most about Dell PowerScale: one is the speed of the data that we get. We are able to access our data because of the Solidigm solid-state drives very quickly. Also, those drives are rock solid. That is the other thing that we are loving is that we never have to worry about some kind of failure happening on our storage side of things.

Currently, Dell PowerScale is the center of our mainframe of our core of our business, and it is where we store everything. It is where we access everything. It allows us to access our partners and actually drive our partners' projects throughout the world, which is super helpful for us. As we continue to grow and become more mobile as a virtual production provider, Dell PowerScale will start to show up on our mobile stages. For instance, we have recently taken on Chicago, so our facilities now operate out of Cinespace Chicago, where they do the series Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med. All of those shows have their own libraries of assets. By having something such as Dell PowerScale on the stage, we can store all of those assets in one place where together they have decided they want to work together as they do, because they are all in the same offices. Now they can share all those assets, and they are all now directly available on the stage. That is a huge game-changer because sometimes you show up and everything was approved, and everybody says this is the one we want to use. Then you get there, and the director says, 'It is not exactly what I want. Let us see what else we have.' Now we have a catalog of thousands and thousands of terabytes of things that we can get access to.

Dell PowerScale out of the box has a lot of amazing features, and we have really loved incorporating them into our entire ecosystem for technology. Improvements could potentially involve using AI. I am sure they will find ways to reduce the amount of data that is being stored by finding the same files that are copied over and over again and maybe creating one file with a root structure to get to that. I think that is probably something that they are working on. I would love to see that because once again, you are reducing the amount of data that we need to store. As I said before, we are always needing more and more because data gets bigger and bigger. Ways that we can continue to try to compress that as it keeps getting bigger will just help us keep inside that sort of ever-growing need.

We have been using Dell PowerScale for about four years now.

I do not see any concerns, but so far we have never had Dell PowerScale go down, be slow, or give us any kind of issue that hurt us in any way on a production or even just on a non-production day, so we are very happy with its reliability.

The process is very simple to scale Dell PowerScale. You can just continue to add more units to the system, and my understanding is that the more units that you add, the faster it gets. The more units that you add, the faster it gets, which is kind of amazing. It does not make sense to me, but that is what it does.

I do not call the Dell customer service and support team that; I feel they are an integral part of our business. We have built friendships, and we have built these relationships that go far beyond support, and when you need support, they are 100% there.

When I started Orbital Studios six years ago, I do not know that I believed that a technical service partner such as Dell would ever take on a company such as ours or be so involved in what we do, and it really has been a game-changer for us.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Dell's customer service and support a 1,000.

At Orbital, we had tried solutions across the board. We had separate SSD drives, we had external drives that we would just run from office to office, and we had no central data storage hub that we could all rely on and know where things are at all times. I could not even tell you the brands of the different ones that we have had. We certainly had non-solid-state drives that failed, and they fail often. When you are in a business such as ours, we cannot have data fail. The more that we can protect that and really feel in our minds a piece of mind that that is not something that is going to happen, the Solidigm solid-state drives have been just rock solid inside Dell PowerScale, and they continue to be, and we love to be able to rely on that.

The biggest return on investment that we would get with Dell PowerScale is the speed of production. We have to be fast. We have to be top of the line constantly. We are sitting inside a multi-million dollar stage, driving multi-million dollars worth of content, with more and more millions of dollars standing around us in talent and in equipment. We cannot be the slowest one. We have to be bleeding edge all the time to stay up with what production needs, and being ahead of them is even better. Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.

Every time Orbital looks at a new technology or taking on a new product, we do extensive research. We are constantly trying to make sure we are making the right decisions with the money we are spending because every dollar counts. We do not want to buy something and have it be obsolete in a year, which is really hard with computers because they usually are. I would say that still to this day, hands down, there is no solution such as Dell PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale and the other Dell products that we use together form an ecosystem for us that provides us with the top-level, bleeding-edge technology that we need constantly for speed, for power, for everything that we do driven by AI. Everything stays at the top level, cutting edge or bleeding edge because of Dell and Dell PowerScale.

The thing about data is it never gets smaller. It is constantly growing, fidelity is constantly growing, and we have to keep up with that. Televisions are currently 4K and 8K and soon they will be 12K, and that means you have to film at those higher resolutions, which means we need higher resolution data to support that. That constant chain of events is fully supported by Dell.

A big part of our growth has been in AI, and a lot of that is supported by Dell PowerScale. A lot of that is because we are now writing our own programs to both manage our projects and manage our assets, and also develop new ways of doing things such as Gaussian splatting, neural radiance fields, and different ways to project 3D assets on an LED wall. All of those things are supported because of the underlying data that is required in order to make that happen.

I would rate this review a 1,000.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) use cases are typically object and file storage. Originally, most of the customers were using it as a NAS device, network-attached storage, such as a G drive or shared storage on PCs, Macs, or servers. Then customers started bringing in replication, dedupe, and the use cases grew from there.

To measure success with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it is very fast, so speed is not necessarily a metric, but typically I look at the number of users. I have had a couple hundred to a couple thousand users with no issues with speed or connectivity. You have to look at your infrastructure to see what your infrastructure can handle, and based on that, the only bottleneck would be your network infrastructure, because the array has 100 gig and 200 gig connectivity. If you are replicating, you can replicate to the cloud or another Isilon. It basically comes down to throughput on your network, which seems to be the biggest limitation I have run into.

One downside of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it is really complicated to configure. It is not something you can just sit down and do in an hour. It is time-consuming, and many companies that I have dealt with have used professional services to come in and set it up in the first place. Ease of configuration would be a significant improvement. It is very powerful and can do a lot, but the starting setup is the time-consuming part.

For the deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), one person can do it, but it is time-consuming. You log into the interface, set up all the replication settings, set up all the domains, and everything else. It is time-consuming, but I also used to use VNX and VMAX, and I have discovered that Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit more complicated to configure. It just needs a bit more expertise. In other words, somebody who does not know Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not going to be able to sit down and configure it easily.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since around 2004 when EMC bought Isilon. I actually QA'd Dell PowerScale (Isilon) at the time, did some testing, and then I wrote the certification exam for Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) stability is solid as a rock. I have not had any major issues with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). I have been working with it for years. There was maybe once an issue, and that was a minor issue, a code issue. For the most part, it is pretty stable.

I would give Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a score of 10 for scalability, as it can go from one node to 256 nodes or something. I have never gone that high, so I do not know.

I have contacted the technical support of Dell regarding Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a couple of times.

The quality and speed of their answers when contacting Dell support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) depend on who you talk to when you call into support. Sometimes you can get somebody who is really sharp, and sometimes you get somebody who is following a script. However, once you pass that, the L2 or L3 people are pretty knowledgeable.

For the support of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I would probably say about an eight and a half to nine.

Positive

Regarding maintenance for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), once you set it up and configure it, nobody ever has to deal with it. There is very little maintenance involved. Now that they are using SSDs and NVMEs, the failure rate is a few years, if that, five years. There is no real maintenance required. Obviously, there are updates if you are adding servers or adding nodes to the cluster, but there is no day-to-day maintenance needed.

I do not do anything with pricing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), so I could not tell you. To give you my quick background, I did EMC installations for six and a half years working for CDW where we installed the VMAX, VNX, Unity, Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and all the EMC products. That is where I come from. In addition to working at EMC and Dell at the time when it came out, I have also done the implementations and worked with people. Most recently, I actually was managing several Isilons. That is where I come from, and I have seen it from start to finish.

In terms of which solution is closest to Dell PowerScale (Isilon) regarding quality and features, I know Pure has a NAS storage, though I forget what it is called, and they use NVMe. Honestly, the way I look at it is that EMC and Dell, I used to work for EMC before they became Dell, but EMC had minor products, and then they started buying products and solutions. They bought Isilon, Unity, VNX, and a bunch of products, so EMC was buying the best in the market. Now that Dell owns EMC, they are the number one in the market right now for it, as far as I am concerned. If you are looking for a solution and price is not an object, Dell is the way to go. If you want to try and lowball somebody, maybe you would want to go with Pure or something else.

Overall, I would give Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a score right around a nine or a 10 compared to the others that are out in the market. I have given this review an overall rating of 9.

When users request a CIFS file share, they specify the SMB share name and the SmartConnect zone name where it needs to be created. For NFS shares, they provide the server names requiring mount access. Once we create the NFS file share, we add those IPs to the NFS export list and inform the Linux team to access the file share. For CIFS file shares, we create the SMB share, add the necessary access at the SMB share level, and then inform the Windows team to check with the user for any access-related issues.

We regularly perform health checks on Dell PowerScale, conduct proper health checks, create file shares, and perform DR activities from the Isilon side. These activities form the core of our operations.

Dell PowerScale serves as the main storage for our NAS environment because most users utilize it for Isilon and NFS file shares. We create SMB and NFS file shares, and it has a major impact on our environment.

Dell PowerScale is not currently initiating any AI initiatives from our environment.

Managing enterprise data with Dell PowerScale is productive, and it will carefully evolve to meet future needs by quickly identifying data changes or deletions, allowing us to pinpoint errors at the storage level.

Rolling upgrades allow us to upgrade each node one at a time, while in batch upgrades, we use different storage pools such as A200 and H500. During a batch upgrade, one node upgrades as A200 while another upgrades as H500, thus reducing upgrade time significantly and allowing us to complete the upgrade more easily.

Isilon is very easy to handle, and managing DR activities is straightforward. Whenever we perform a DR activity, it becomes easy to complete from the Isilon side, making it very manageable. In terms of efficiency, Isilon storage performs quite well and proves to be a very reliable storage solution.

Dell PowerScale storage is already very secure, and we cannot perform any unauthorized actions from the Isilon side. It has a high capacity of 500 terabytes, making it quite effective as storage for Isilon.

Dell PowerScale is a very good storage solution that supports multi-protocol setups and introduces innovative approaches to RAID and disk failures, making it superior to other options in the NAS environment.

Regarding user experience, we have noticed we can only add approximately 20 NFS IPs, but according to Dell support, we can add more netgroups, which could make our tasks easier.

I would rate the customer support a perfect ten.

For measuring success with Dell PowerScale, we notice its effectiveness as good storage, and we are using monitoring tools such as InsightIQ to manage the storage efficiently.

While managing complex data sets on the Isilon side, we do not have much experience yet; we are still at the learning level regarding architecture, but we are generally competent with Isilon.

The reliability and availability of Dell PowerScale ensure that whenever we have a node or drive failure, the SmartPool option prevents major issues from arising.

We use Dell PowerScale's data protection features for DR purposes, and for security, we utilize secure accounts with two-factor authentication to access the storage array. We also protect our data at the array level by using specific file-level policies.

For multi-protocol support, we use NFS for Linux and CIFS strictly for Windows environments. We can access NFS file shares through SMB, though it requires proper backend LDAP configuration, enabling access across both environments from a single file share.

The overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale is commendable; it is very good storage with easy access via GUI, meaning we do not need to perform many complex maneuvers for storage management.

If we consider cloud-based operations, Dell PowerScale handles storage easily from our on-premise setup, and we do not face any issues such as power outages in the future.

The integration of Dell PowerScale with our existing IT infrastructure plays a significant role in operational efficiency, as it integrates well into our setup.

I give Dell PowerScale an overall rating of eight.

Dell PowerScale drives our file share storage. We came from NetApp and had a lot of difficulty managing, but Dell PowerScale has allowed us to consolidate all file systems into one location that is easily managed.

The features of Dell PowerScale that I appreciate most are that it is scalable and able to centralize.

Dell PowerScale aligns with our organization's strategic goals of improving operational efficiency because we are able to provide a centralized location for file systems. Our customers are able to use it for regular file management, but at the same time, we can put other types of workloads and application workloads that are tied back to Dell PowerScale.

Our primary software of records uses that as its foundation in the background. We present that to it and they do not have to worry about file size limitations.

Dell PowerScale aligns with our organization's goals of supporting digital transformation initiatives because our organization took a lot of microfilm and digitized it. We were looking for a location to store it, and Dell PowerScale is that location.

If I include a limitation and this is an improvement thing, the way we are set up, we have two data centers and two deployments of Dell PowerScale, and they are both synchronizing with each other. An improvement of that technology when it comes to DR implementations is something that I would look to see in the future. It is there, but it is not 100% in a way that is easy to implement.

Dell PowerScale can be improved because we just went through a case of upgrading code on Dell PowerScale. It should be made more user-friendly in the sense that if I manage it, I should be able to deploy it without having to have a lot of interaction from support. In the past, we had to hire support to do that. I would like to see it strive to get better, especially if you start introducing components like AI where you can tell the system to do it for you or at least explain it in a better way.

My company has been using Dell PowerScale for the past six years. Before that, we had a Vblock, which was a product of Dell, EMC, and VMware. Dell acquired EMC at some point.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale as actually good; however, we experienced some issues. It was not 100% the fault of the product. It was a combination of our backup strategy interacting with a third party that Dell sold us. Dell did not have a good way to do DR at the time, and we implemented software that did that for us to eliminate the hands-on approach. That software was conflicting with our backup and it became a huge issue where we were filling up Dell PowerScale due to that scenario. Again, it was not the fault of the product; it was just implementing different technologies, which in a business you need, your backup systems. That became a big issue for us.

We have not actually been able to expand the usage of Dell PowerScale because we still are at a point where we acquired it and we still have enough room. I did mention earlier that we are digitizing microfilms. That initial dump of that data was about a terabyte that we had to dump. There is more to come. We see that in the future we are going to have to look at expanding it, but we are also in a tech refresh cycle, so we might get the next iteration with bigger drives.

I would evaluate customer service and tech support as positive; I have not really had any issues with it. If I do not get my response as fast as I want to, I do have my Dell contacts that I can contact directly. But again, that is just in case of emergency when I need somebody on top. For the most part, we open tickets and we get answers.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their customer service and tech support as nine.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerScale, we were using NetApp at the beginning.

To measure success with Dell PowerScale, we look at performance metrics or benchmarks, and one example would be one of our tier one applications, which is where we store our records; it has to be able to return those records efficiently. The fact that we are able to look at metrics from the Apex AI portal that Dell provides, which is connected to Dell PowerScale, we are able to see IOPS presented there and file access and all those types of events that help us organize the data better. We can target specific departments and say, 'This is how you are using things,' and adjust accordingly.

We considered other solutions before selecting Dell PowerScale, and we were looking for something that was easy for us to implement DR. We also looked at HP hardware. What we liked about it is that even before it became Dell PowerScale, it was Isilon. We knew about Isilon and its capabilities, and Dell has taken that product and made it better. This is where we decided this was the time to introduce Dell PowerScale into our environment.

My role in using and managing Dell PowerScale is that I am the systems manager for our IT team and operations team.

Dell PowerScale does not play any role in our organization's AI initiatives yet, but data has to be prepared for that. This is that data has to be ready before you even introduce it to AI. Since Dell PowerScale holds a lot of our data, we have not really explored allowing AI to touch it. Our goal in the next five to six years is to prepare data. Having it in a centralized location will help with that.

I rate Dell PowerScale in general and overall as eight or nine, just because of the DR scenario. That is the biggest challenge we have with the platform. Our storage engineer actually said Hitachi can do this without this complexity, and he was selling this as an option for us. But it did not address the issue of escalation. We were looking at a compromise. Because of the implementation of a third-party software to do the DR scenario, we went with this solution. We just took the pros and cons and said that Dell PowerScale was the right choice for us. My overall review rating for Dell PowerScale is eight out of ten.

My role in using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is primarily management. I do infrastructure in addition to information security for the club, so that includes upgrades, management of all the shares, and pretty much the product from replication between our main site and our DR site.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has supported our growth and operational success because we have used it extensively as our files platform for a number of years now. It functions as a hybrid situation between SharePoint online and OneDrive, but we still have a need for a lot of our broadcast media on-premises, which supports our security and surveillance and anything that does not make sense to put in the cloud.

The feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that I prefer most is primarily its SMB sharing capability to support my file store.

In terms of features, it is a solid platform. We have really had no issues with hardware, which in this case is probably the most important thing. Replication works, snapshotting works.

I do think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has features that specifically cater to the needs of small and medium companies. There are some entry-level platforms below that tier; we have dabbled in those as well. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is definitely more enterprise class.

The features that I have mentioned improve my company through the reliability of the storage. It is always available, and it works, which is the important thing. The material we are storing on it is important to the business, so the fact that we never have to worry about it and people can use it easily is good for us.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could be improved, particularly the UI, which could use some polishing as far as ease of use for the customer.

Regarding the UI, it is engineered as a technical platform. It could use some improvements from an aesthetic perspective and for ease of functionality.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for pretty much all 18 years.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) definitely scales well with the growing needs of my company. It is easy to add nodes, and we can grow it out if we needed to. What we have right now is adequate for our utilization, but there were no challenges if we needed to build out.

Regarding customer service and technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I have never really had a problem. We have had a couple of drive replacements, and parts are always readily available and arrive quickly. If required, an engineer will come on site to do repairs and fixes. Tech support has been good.

I would rate customer service and technical support from Dell PowerScale (Isilon) definitely an eight; it is up there.

Positive

I did consider switching or trying other products along the way. We had a NetApp, and it worked, but Dell was cheaper, and it has been performant and satisfies our business needs, so we have stayed with it.

For me, the biggest return on investment when using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is definitely the length of time that we get to use the hardware. What we have right now is probably eight-plus years old, and it is still going strong and still supported, which is nice.

As for my experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we have had Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for a while now, so we are basically on the renewal track all the time. We did not find it to be overly cost prohibitive when we first acquired it, and the licensing continues to be acceptable.

In terms of performance metrics or benchmarks to measure success with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), for us, it is basically the availability.

We have done work with our rep from time to time with data collection metrics that are collected through SRS, so they will look at those. There is another tool they have us run sometimes, but I cannot recall the name of it.

At the moment, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) does not play a role in my company's AI initiatives, but that does not mean down the line that we may not utilize some form of on-premises storage to support that. We are in the beginning phases of building out what our AI is going to look like, so it is yet to be determined.

I would see Dell PowerScale (Isilon) being implemented in AI use as the back-end storage to something, be it some sort of box that we put in our data center that will need whatever data sets attached to it. I could see it as that storage tier potentially.

My advice to other companies considering Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that it is a solid platform. If you have a need just for files as we do, it is reliable, it is available, and it does not take a lot of maintenance, which is always nice. Administrative overhead is always a bonus when you do not have to do it. I would rate this review an eight overall.

My role in using Dell PowerScale is as the Senior Engineering Manager for VCD, so I am typically involved in the pre-deployment process, sort of in the acquisition process. We have an entire sourcing team, but I make advisories on what to order and how to order it for customers. Most of my work involves pre-deployment and pre-sales technical support.

Dell PowerScale fits well with the growing needs for our organization, as internally we do not use it, but externally, I believe it comes back to its ability to scale and be rapidly deployed, or ease of deployment. I think for large-scale projects, it fits well in our product portfolio.

My favorite thing about Dell PowerScale is its scalability. This is going to sound ridiculous and maybe a little on the nose, but I appreciate being able to rapidly scale the product. For critical infrastructure and we work predominantly in video surveillance, retention can increase all of a sudden. You could have situations for legal purposes or you could have a hospital go from a 30-day retention mandate to a 365-day retention mandate or a casino. When that happens, provisioning additional storage can be difficult. Dell PowerScale solves a lot of those problems because you are literally just dropping in nodes to an existing infrastructure and it gets absorbed and then redistributed to all of the edge compute. Scalability and linear scalability are the key features I value.

Dell PowerScale fits well with the growing needs for our organization, as internally we do not use it, but externally, I believe it comes back to its ability to scale and be rapidly deployed, or ease of deployment. I think for large-scale projects, it fits well in our product portfolio.

The emerging challenges or opportunities I foresee in managing enterprise data include how Dell PowerScale can evolve to better support our future needs. There have been some iterative updates to the UI. It is fairly intuitive already. From an improvement standpoint, cost basis probably, which is never going to change. One of the issues that we run into, at least for us, is its price point in the market. Our market makes it a difficult sell. Mainstream IT data center use, which is where it is targeted, is not as much of a concern. The price points are less of a concern in that space. For us in our industry and for pure data storage, price per terabyte is a massive consideration. That is somewhere where the price could come down. It is unlikely that it will, but the price could come down and make it a little more accessible to some of our customers.

The areas Dell PowerScale could be improved include not so much new features, but I would like to see additional case studies done specific to my industry. There are some, but I would like to see additional case studies for our industry, the security and surveillance industry, done with particular VMS ISVs. There are some white papers out there from Dell in how Dell PowerScale interfaces with a Milestone VMS, but I would like to see more information on how it interacts with other major VMS platforms. More publicly published information about that would be beneficial.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale as excellent. I have not experienced any downtime that I am aware of.

I would evaluate customer service for Dell PowerScale as excellent. Quick engagement time is typical, usually either on the sales or support side, and engagement is always quick. When we have a project, an open project that we have sold to a customer, there is a kickoff meeting and usually setting those times, getting those resources brought in is usually very fast. It is always a pleasurable experience.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerScale, we were using PowerVault, which we still use. This is SAN-based architecture, so block architecture versus NAS.

We have seen ROI on Dell PowerScale deployments specifically.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Dell PowerScale has been expensive. Setup costs or provisioning experience has been pleasant. Typically you have kickoff meetings and there are different teams that are engaged with myself and with other teams within my organization. That is a pleasant experience. It is sort of almost a white-glove experience, at least the way we order and provision these for our customers. The provisioning experience is very pleasant. However, pricing methodology is a difficult hurdle for us to sell to our customers.

I considered no other solutions before selecting Dell PowerScale. I would say we were pretty fixated on PowerVault and given that we are a partner, Dell PowerScale has been on our radar for a long time. I would say we did dabble in NetApp solutions at one point, but we moved all of our NAS business over to Dell PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale does not currently play a role in our organization's AI initiatives, but it will probably more so in the future.

The performance metrics or benchmarks I use to measure our success with Dell PowerScale include continued demand for the product. I would also say continued support of the existing product or expansion of an existing infrastructure.

I would rate Dell PowerScale a 7.5 to 8, knocking some points off from a barrier to entry from a cost perspective. Specific to our industry, it really has to be a niche deployment. It would have to be for critical infrastructure or large-scale organizations, such as casinos or stadiums, to benefit from it. I would honestly look at the particular project and only recommend it to critical infrastructure or large-scale projects or projects that I think will experience rapid growth in the near future because then scaling it will be easier and quicker. My overall review rating for Dell PowerScale is 8.

I have been with DTE for 30 years, and my role involves using and managing Dell PowerScale. We are in the infant stages for many of our AI initiatives, but I see that progressing with Dell PowerScale.

OneFS makes it simpler to manage, which is beneficial. I appreciate the soft and hard quotas, and I want to implement chargebacks now. I can control access through Active Directory with Dell PowerScale, allowing people to get their file shares that way, which is convenient for them. Snapshot is quite good; I had that with my Unities, but it appears to be easier to manage on the Isilon platform.

Dell PowerScale provides better performance than some of my smaller Unities that hold considerable data. I have data sitting in there that I migrated which is 10 to 15 years old, and unfortunately, nobody wants to clean it up. With Dell PowerScale, I can keep scaling where Unity had a head limit.

An example of how Dell PowerScale can be improved is that we had a situation where somebody accidentally renamed our home directory to a different folder, and then my team could not put it back because it kept recreating the home folder every time they moved it. I quickly moved it at the Unix level, renamed it, copied the original back, and recovered it immediately. However, we discovered that a bunch of user permissions got changed, so we had a challenge resetting permissions. Dell explained how to fix it, but I wish we had a method to discover such conditions before the user points it out.

I foresee challenges such as cleanup and trying to get rid of things we do not need anymore, as people find it easier to just expand rather than go through and figure out what must be removed. I do appreciate that Dell PowerScale is introducing cyber resilience, which I look forward to, and we are using Superna Eyeglass to integrate some of that functionality.

I have been using Dell PowerScale since we replaced our Unity 500 about four years ago, starting with the Isilon before it was relabeled.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale to be strong. We have had a few performance issue calls, particularly from a group that does file transfers who noted that it is somewhat slow, but I do not think it is on the Isilon side. I believe it is more related to their processes.

Dell PowerScale is performing well with the growing needs of my organization, with no issues so far. We have expanded usage; we bought it fairly large and sized it for our needs, ensuring sufficient headroom capacity. I project three to five years down the road and buy that size when we upgrade. We are currently in year four and still in good shape.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as better than the support group we outsource at DTE that runs our data center.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerScale, we were using Unities. We still have Unities, but in smaller scale environments that are more stand-alone, while our big NAS is now using the Isilon.

We considered other solutions such as NetApp, which looked decent. It is not forklift, but Dell PowerScale follows that same model, which helped us make the decision.

I measure success with Dell PowerScale by noting that there are no complaints from the customer. I would rate customer service support a nine out of ten because they get my offshore support team over the hump to get things done. Those team members do not even try; they just open a ticket and let the vendor handle it, which frustrates me since I used to be hands-on and knew how to handle 99 percent of these issues. I would rate Dell PowerScale a ten out of ten, and I am very happy with it and would advise organizations considering it to definitely move forward. My overall review rating for Dell PowerScale is ten.

Before we implemented Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we used an AIX configured as NFS, and that runs on IBM Power and has its own limitations because it shares resources with other LPARs. When our data becomes large, we need to scale out enterprise storage systems like Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Since our organization is a governmental organization, and direct purchase is not allowed, we prepared an RFP, and the vendors participated with the formal bidding process. Different bidders and vendors participated in the bid, and Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled our requirement with the most cost-effectiveness. We selected Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and use it for file storage. The main purpose we use it for is large files in our environment, and it supports multiple protocols like NFS, SMB, and S3 with a single storage plus.

We primarily use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as NFS and SMB. The features we appreciate from it are the SyncIQ feature that supports replication from two site states for disaster recovery purposes. This is beneficial for our disaster recovery plan and for business continuity. SyncIQ is a great feature that we use actively.

Additionally, NFS, SMB, and S3 are good features that we primarily use. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) deployment is user-friendly with a good graphical user interface. It is easy to use and provision the storage for different application purposes.

I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replacement. For large file replication from site to site, it takes a long time. This leads to issues when we plan a switchover from site to site, as the replication is not finished within minimal time. It takes a long time and leads to some downtime until the file is fully synchronized. For a large amount of files, the site-to-site replication takes considerable time, leading to some downtime during planned switching over.

Otherwise, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is good. It is scalable, reliable, and it supports node cluster architecture. Overall, it is a solid solution.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since 2021.

Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). It is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced.

I have contacted technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) through Zoom sessions and email conversations. There is also a person in our country who supports the Dell solution, and they actively assist us with any issues we raise. The quality and speed of support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are good. From my experience, I have confidence in the support. When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.

Positive

Before Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we used AIX as NFS. We configured the AIX server as NFS. We did not have enterprise scale storage like Dell PowerScale (Isilon) before; this is the first one we have used.

When I compare Dell PowerScale (Isilon) with AIX configured as NFS storage, there is a significant difference. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) supports multiple protocols with a single solution, including NFS, SMB, S3, FTP, and HTTP. It is beneficial to support different applications. Additionally, it has a cluster node architecture, which is beneficial for performance and to get more capacity. It is easy to maintain. When we run on AIX, it leads to long downtime when we plan a maintenance task on AIX servers. AIX shares resources with other LPARs, leading to performance issues. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a better solution in comparison.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) requires maintenance on our end, but the maintenance tasks cannot be performed by our organization's team; they must be executed by experienced Dell personnel. We experienced a RAM issue that was replaced during planned maintenance time. Additionally, we perform planned firmware upgrades regarding the software and hardware. The RAM issue was the problem related to Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

For the initial deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it cannot be done by one person alone. In our organization, we built a team for the deployment, and from Dell, they also assigned an experienced person to deploy the solution. From our organization's side, there was a prepared team for the deployment, and from the vendor side, experienced personnel were assigned to deploy the solution. It was deployed effectively.

As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government entity, the country policy does not allow direct purchases; it goes through a formal RFP process. We prepared an RFP, and the bidders and vendors participated in the bidding process. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled the requirement and was the most cost-effective option. This is how we made our selection.

For the support of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I would rate it nine out of ten.

For the overall solution of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I rate it eight out of ten because the SyncIQ replication feature takes a long time for large files, which leads to downtime during planned site switching. Additionally, we have experienced a RAM issue, which is why I rate it this way.

In terms of scalability, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is quite good. I have scaled Dell PowerScale (Isilon) once, and we also have plans to scale it again. It is beneficial for adding capacity and performance. If one node fails, the system continues to work with other nodes, avoiding interruptions and supporting business continuity. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a good scalable solution.

We immediately saw the benefits of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because our files are large. During the deployment of this solution, we did not wait to test the solution; we immediately started migrating the files to the solution. My overall review rating for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is eight out of ten.