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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Hitachi Content Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
NAS (2nd), File and Object Storage (2nd)
Hitachi Content Platform
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (16th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
BE
Systems Engineer at Unisity LLC
Flexibility and reliability have supported seamless data growth
I cannot think of anything to improve about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The hardest challenge we have is due to how we've bought things over time. The way that we moved to the PowerEdge platform for the newer systems creates a scale problem as I still buy the older style systems, which are more dense storage. They're different chassis, so the problem we run into in the data center is the depth of the actual equipment. The newer equipment, if we buy an FX910 or a 900, it's a lot shorter in scale than if I buy an 83,000, which is much bigger. This makes it more complicated for deployment.
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at Synergy Computers
Integrates well with existing systems but technical support for the platform needs improvement
While deployment is simple, it's not as simple as StorageGRID. The architecture is entirely different, even though the end product uses the same protocols. The user interface isn't as user-friendly, and the management platform UI isn't as intuitive as others. Deployment isn't as centralized either. Although I've deployed Hitachi Content myself in our production head office for the VM team, even though it's simple, it wasn't completely straightforward. They still required my help with the initial configuration environment setup. So, it's not just simple; there are some tricky aspects. The environment is tricky, but if you understand it, configuration can be done quickly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"FlashArray has many valuable features. It's very user-friendly and it has high availability, so there is comparatively less downtime. During maintenance, there is no shutdown procedure, so you can directly power off the Array and manage the shutdown process without any data loss, which is a unique feature. Managing replication and data migration is also very easy."
"Remote assist is a valuable feature that supports customers and engineers in troubleshooting and resolving issues, allowing for easy problem identification and repair."
"The Pure Storage customer service is by far the best part of the product and organization."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It overperforms both in terms of storage capacity and throughput, and bandwidth capability."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"It assists with eliminating storage silos because it provides SMB and NFS protocols. PowerScale has also helped free up our employee's time to focus on other business priorities."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) actually combined a shared file system that scales seamlessly and works effectively, making the blocking and tackling exactly what was advertised."
"Eyeglass is used to monitor for malware, which is very useful for us."
"The solution allows me to use SSMDS to store data for end users and share it within different locations."
"The best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"With Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it uses not just a terabyte but petabytes of data, storing a large amount of data takes within minutes, and you can bring it down to seconds as well, as it does not take much time to upload or copy the data here and there, and upgrades also do not take much time."
"The platform helps in efficient data management with the ease of server provisioning."
"Companies can scale the solution."
"As an architect, I like the management features that come with Hitachi Content Platform because it makes things easy."
"Integrating Hitachi Content Platform with existing systems is not challenging."
"One of the most hidden valuable features is ensuring that you don't have bit rot, so it will go and check every single object that's stored on the system, then ensure that if there's a problem, it'll be repaired from either a local copy or remote copy, depending upon your configuration."
"We are using Content Platform for data migration, and it integrates with our HNS platform. This is good because we can integrate it with our existing HNS and SAP solutions. The GUI is also user-friendly. It doesn't take much time to do anything. If we know the architecture and the steps, we can do what we need with a few clicks."
"The Hitachi Content Platform is a stable and reliable solution."
"The features that I have found most valuable are their retention logs. The other thing I have found most valuable is the way they handle the BHEA. Basically the DNS and everything is managed by itself. It is seamless to the users."
 

Cons

"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"One requested enhancement yet to manifest is the scheduling of snapshot replications."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"It is a bit expensive."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"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."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things."
"I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon)."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"The deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not really complex but depends on the hardware deployment."
"The solution could use more integration with clouds."
"The only thing is that it should be more cost effective."
"Although they claim to provide NFS, the actual implementation requires an additional gateway, which makes it a costly solution."
"Hitachi Content Platform is a complicated solution. You need to put several pieces of the hardware together in order to achieve the capacity or the performance needed."
"Two things that can be improved are pricing and configuration. Mostly the pricing is an issue. And if I were to add anything, I would say more integration with backup solutions such as Veeam Backup."
"When you want to replace a disk, we need to start the maintenance from the S nodes. We have to automate maintenance so any onsite engineer can replace it after that, but we don't need to do this on VSP platforms. An engineer can come in and replace that specific disk. If also we could do that on Hitachi Content Platform, it would be great for us."
"This product's ability to track logs for access still needs to be improved."
"The user interface isn't as user-friendly, and the management platform UI isn't as intuitive as others. So it can be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution could be cheaper."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could always improve. They are still more expensive than some alternative offerings. Cost is always a concern and when there is a battle they tend to be more expensive."
"Pure Storage has not helped us to reduce our licensing costs."
"All storage is expensive so any price improvement would help."
"In terms of other contemporary arrays, Pure is something you need to have a use case for, as it's not priced for you to buy one off-the-shelf. If you have a use case, heavy lift Oracle Databases, any type of noticeable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or need low latency and high throughput, you should consider all-flash at least and probably Pure Storage."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"The pricing is excellent."
"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."
"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."
"The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"The price of the solution is high."
"The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past."
"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 product’s cost is average."
"I think the ROI for this solution is very good because the pricing for it is in between other solutions."
"The price of the Hitachi Content Platform is very high."
"Hitachi is more expensive than StorageGRID."
"Pricing is comparable to other solutions in the market."
"The pricing could be better."
"Overall, it's costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise44
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
What do you like most about Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government ...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replace...
What needs improvement with Hitachi Content Platform?
In comparison to competitors like Huawei, which can use all storage protocols in the same platform, Hitachi Content P...
What is your primary use case for Hitachi Content Platform?
Mainly, from my project, Hitachi Content Platform is used for archiving. The customer is in banking, so they need to ...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
HCP, Hitachi Vantara Content Platform, Hitachi Vantara HCP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
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,
Rabobank, Xinhua News Agency, Kremsm'ller Industrieanlagenbau KG, KSC Commercial Internet, AIS Group, Shanghai Interactive Television Co. Ltd (SiTV), China Telecom, Spin Master
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Hitachi Content Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.