Amazon FSx vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon) comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.3, while Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.0% mindshare in FaOS, compared to Dell Technologies’s 8.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Dell PowerScale and Amazon FSx compete in the enterprise storage solutions category. Dell PowerScale has the upper hand in customer service, while Amazon FSx is preferred for its advanced feature set.

Features: Dell PowerScale delivers robust data scalability and easy management, supports vast data growth, and excels in network-attached storage capabilities. Amazon FSx offers flexibility through storage types like Lustre for high-performance computing and Windows File Server, aligning features with cloud-centered needs, and enhancing integration with AWS services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon FSx simplifies deployment and scaling with seamless AWS ecosystem integration but suffers mixed perceptions regarding support. Dell PowerScale, despite a complex setup, benefits from reliable customer service, appealing to enterprises requiring thorough assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale involves a notable upfront investment but offers strong ROI through scalability and efficient data management. Amazon FSx employs a pay-as-you-go model, reducing initial costs and providing flexibility in expenses, enhancing ROI for cloud-centric needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon FSx vs. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.7%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon FSx is 1.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 8.6%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File and Object Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)	8.6%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	5.7%
Amazon FSx	1.0%
Other	84.7%

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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MuhammadAzhar Khan

Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group

Shared storage capabilities provide enterprise value with good reliability

Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS. The auto-scaling feature should be improved, as it currently includes downtime. I need to manually increase the storage, which is not ideal. Integrating FSx with Windows Server is challenging; it's a long process involving Active Directory (AD) setup and synchronization.

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Scott Taylor

Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Manages large data sets efficiently with hybrid cloud integration

My organization is quite large, with about 30,000 employees. The growth has been substantial in areas such as radiology and genomics. One of the best features we've utilized recently is offload to cloud pools due to capacity constraints on-premise. We didn't want to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) straight away, so we utilized cloud pools to offload some data to Azure. That's really saved us in certain areas as we didn't have funding to expand Dell PowerScale (Isilon) until next year, which is why we utilized the cloud pools functionality to offload.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"The solution provides many controllers."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."

"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."

"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."

"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."

"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale is its scalability."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the unlimited scalability. The tool has high availability and high storage capacity."

"The most valuable feature is its single space of storage."

"Certainly, we have seen return on investment and peace of mind, especially with our two clusters that are linked together, where one is a disaster recovery solution for the other."

"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."

"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."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) definitely deserves ten out of ten for scalability."

"The stability of the solution is good."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros

Cons

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"The speed could be improved."

"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."

"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."

"From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS."

"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."

"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."

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

"We have issues in Brazil with the procurement of solutions because we have to check the entire market and justify the pricing to our audit institutions, making it difficult to keep with the same vendor."

"They should add some new services that should be for on-premises, and more analytics should be there for the data, allowing for a deep dive from that analytics, which is currently missing."

"Improvements could be made to reduce the costs and the high level of knowledge needed to maintain and use them. We had old hard drives with moving parts in Dell PowerScale, and due to this, we must switch to a more efficient environment with all-flash."

"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."

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

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve in terms of having some problems with using IPv6 and IPv4 on the same namespace at the same time, which is one of our biggest problems as you have to do some really bad workarounds to get that working."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be cheaper."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The product is very expensive."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."

"It's a high-cost offering amounting to three or four million Swedish kronor, or about $400,000 or euros, for approximately 480 terabytes of storage."

"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."

"The pricing is excellent."

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

"It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements."

"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."

"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	36

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?

From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for highe...

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What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?

Our customers mainly use Amazon FSx for high-performance computing. Our customers are mainly in the Life Science and ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?

There is an ongoing project where my customers are exploring the FSx solution, but not yet for AI-driven projects; th...

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What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

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

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wa...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

With every iteration of the OneFS system, new features are being added, and the UI is being updated here and there. S...

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Comparisons

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 8% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Amazon FSx

Compared 23% of the time

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 12% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs Amazon FSx

Compared 11% of the time

Qumulo vs Amazon FSx

Compared 7% of the time

VAST Data vs Amazon FSx

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon FSx Competitors

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 16% of the time

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 9% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 8% of the time

HPE StoreEasy vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 6% of the time

VAST Data vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Compared 5% of the time

More Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Storage

September 2025

Download Amazon FSx product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

September 2025

Download Dell PowerScale (Isilon) product report

Also Known As

No data available

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems. With Amazon FSx, you can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. It provides cost-efficient capacity and high levels of reliability, and it integrates with other AWS services so that you can manage and use the file systems in cloud-native ways.

Amazon FSx provides you with two file systems to choose from: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for enterprise workloads and Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-performance workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dell PowerScale leads in unstructured data management with unified file and object storage, massive scalability, security, and cloud adaptability, enhancing AI, analytics, and enterprise applications with exceptional performance and resilience.

Dell PowerScale Isilon provides a comprehensive platform for unstructured data, excelling in scalability, management, and performance. With features like single-pane management, SyncIQ, and SmartQuotas, it handles large datasets with flexibility and robust security. Its multi-protocol support and seamless expansion improve operational efficiency. While it offers strong data protection, enhancements in cloud integration, cybersecurity, and performance are sought. Users note potential for cost reductions and streamlined configurations and mention desired improvements in object storage handling and NFS support.

What are the key features of Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Single-pane management: Simplifies data control and monitoring through a unified interface.
SyncIQ: Ensures efficient data replication for business continuity.
SmartQuotas: Provides intelligent quota management for optimized storage allocation.
Multi-protocol support: Facilitates cross-platform data access and integration.
Seamless storage expansion: Allows effortless scaling to accommodate growing data needs.

What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Operational efficiency: Reduces workload with easy management and automation.
Enhanced security: Offers comprehensive data protection and recovery options.
Scalability: Supports large-scale data storage with flexible growth capabilities.
Performance: Delivers high-speed data processing for demanding applications.
Integration flexibility: Adapts to on-prem and hybrid cloud environments for diverse deployment needs.

Organizations across industries utilize Dell PowerScale Isilon for large-scale unstructured storage, supporting applications like video archiving, genomic data storage, and high-resolution imaging. Educational institutions, research centers, and media enterprises rely on its scaled-out storage capabilities, providing centralized, secure storage for diverse applications in hybrid, cloud, and on-prem environments.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell

OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,

Buyer's Guide

Amazon FSx vs. Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon FSx vs. Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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