Dell ECS vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon) comparison

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.

Enterprise-ready. Future-proof. Data-first.

Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a file and object storage solution from Dell EMC. ECS has been created to support both traditional and next-generation ecosystems equally. ECS boasts unrivaled economics, manageability, resilience, and scalability to satisfy the demands of today's next-gen, robust business enterprise ecosystems. ECS can easily be deployed in a software-defined model or as a turn-key appliance. ECS is software-defined and multi-layered for unlimited scalability. Every layer is abstracted and scalable with no single point of failure.

• Data service layer: Provides S3 access along with access to SWIFT, CAZ, NFS, HDFS.
• Storage service layer: Stores, retrieves and protects data.
• Fabric layer: Provides clustering, configuration management, health monitoring.

Everything is done within the software, which is containerized, using docker.

ECS is currently deployed using basic commodity hardware, which can easily be federated across as many as eight different locations and managed as a single resource. Additionally, ECS can also protect data at the site level, locally, disk, node, and rack levels. The federation enables a single global namespace with everywhere access to content. Applications can quickly rewrite in an active/active or everywhere active manner.

ECS is also able to be used as secondary storage or archival storage. This will free up valuable primary storage of data that is stale, redundant, or used infrequently, and the data will remain easily accessible. ECS uses policy-based tiering such as Data Domain, Cloud tiering, Isilon using cloud polls, and Geodrive, which give Windows systems direct access to ECS. Windows users can still use server message block (SMB) while leveraging the more expansive ECS storage.

ECS is enterprise-grade and offers valuable features such as retention, multi-tenancy, metering, monitoring, quotas, and more. ECS builds in robust security from the ground up and encrypts data. ECS is compliant with STIG guidelines and adheres to SEC rule 17A-4F.

ECS is an enterprise-ready solution that allows organizations to easily simplify object storage management and visualize information in intuitive new ways, and empowers your business to do even more with data. With ECS, enterprise organizations can deliver cloud-scale economics in-house that will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale, creating greater levels of productivity and profitability.

Reviews from Real Users

One user, who is a deputy director at a tech service company, says ECS offers “good performance, reliability, and technical support”.

Dell EMC ECS is “a stable solution which is easy to scale, install and manage”, relates another user, who is a senior buyer at a tech service company.

"What I like best about this product is that it is a complete solution, both hardware, and software, by the same vendor," summarizes a system engineer at a tech services company. 

Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) storage solutions are designed to help manage data for enterprises of all types. Dell PowerScale systems are simple to install, manage, and scale to virtually any size and include a choice of all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes. Dell PowerScale solutions stay flexible and reliable no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future.

With Dell PowerScale, your data lake always stays simple to manage, simple to grow, simple to protect, and simple enough to handle the most demanding current and future workloads.

Ideal for companies of any size, from small enterprises to multi-national ones, Dell PowerScale storage provides secure collaboration, modular scalability, flexible consumption models, and easy cloud integrations, all with management tools spanning multiple platforms.

Key Benefits of Dell EMC PowerScale Storage

• Centralized management: Manage your storage infrastructure from a single unified platform.
  
  
• Data protection: Dell PowerScale offers security, data protection and replication tools. Back up and protect your data from cyber-attacks with an integrated ransomware defense system.
  
  
• Artificial intelligence: PowerScale is the foundation for building an integrated and optimized IT infrastructure for AI projects, from concept to production.
  
  
• Cloud support: Store and manage your data on the cloud and move data between your data center and the cloud. Dell PowerScale runs data-intensive cloud workloads with no outbound traffic costs.
  
  
• Long-term storage: Dell PowerScale offers highly efficient and resilient active archive storage or long-term data retention for large-scale data archives. With the proven scalability architecture of PowerScale, you can meet your growing archiving demands. Dell PowerScale has a wide variety of enterprise-grade data protection and security options to keep your archived data safe.

Reviews from Real Users

Dell EMC PowerScale storage stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its scalability capabilities and its user-friendly centralized management system.

Rachel B., a chief operations officer & acting CFO at Like a Photon, writes, "PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale."

Keith B., the director of IT at NatureFresh Farms, writes, "The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes, and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."