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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nasuni comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 7, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
PowerScale enhances data management efficiency, reducing costs and energy usage while boosting performance, reliability, and operational efficiency for enterprises.
Sentiment score
7.5
Nasuni users enjoy cost savings, increased productivity, and efficiency from reduced labor, cloud scalability, and improved data management.
Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.
In terms of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) specifically, we have seen a return on investment due to faster performance than our last few storage arrays, and the general usability is a lot better.
The second cluster of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) gives us flexibility for small things like code upgrades, all the way to scenarios where we have lost this data center or data, allowing us to check if data is still intact on the other side.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
Dell PowerScale customer service is praised for responsiveness and knowledge, though some report mixed experiences with first-level support.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nasuni's customer service is praised for responsiveness and professionalism, efficiently solving issues with reliable and knowledgeable support.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
Dell provides support within four hours, and they always fulfill their promises.
They have managed previous issues well.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Dell PowerScale efficiently scales with large data demands, seamless expansions, and supports diverse applications with on-premise and cloud integration.
Sentiment score
7.3
Nasuni offers scalable, user-friendly data storage, efficiently meeting diverse organizational needs and supporting physical or virtual deployments.
We started on PowerScale with around about 300 terabytes and are now two and a half petabytes, still on the same file system.
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.
Dell PowerScale is highly scalable, as evidenced by the reduced physical hardware and the efficient use of rack space.
I rated the scalability as seven because even though the solution can scale, load balancing must be done manually, as it's not automated.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) offers excellent stability with minimal downtime, efficient clustering, and high user ratings for reliability.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nasuni is praised for its stability, offering reliable performance, minimal maintenance, and flexibility with virtually no downtime issues.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect.
I find the product to be resilient and stable. There's no downtime and no crashes.
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerScale struggles with high costs, complex updates, limited improvements, and lacks cloud and multi-tenant capabilities.
Nasuni struggles with cloud integration, performance, and user experience, needing improvements in data retention, security, and analytics.
Hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline.
I would want to see more AI features with Dell PowerScale (Isilon).
If I could improve one thing on Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it would be better object storage as it recently breached into S3, and that capability could be broadened.
I suggest Nasuni improve their syslog forwarders to support TCP protocol, as it's more secure than UDP, which is plain text and not protected at all.
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerScale is costly but offers fair pricing and scalability, appealing to enterprises with extensive data requirements.
Nasuni offers competitive pricing with flexible cloud compatibility, licensing per terabyte, and cost-effective enterprise solutions.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) shows it's a premium platform, so it's a big amount of money.
The pricing is excellent.
I prefer solutions with lower pricing.
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerScale excels in management, scalability, and performance, offering flexibility, resilience, and cost-effective storage with advanced monitoring.
Nasuni provides scalable cloud-based file management with global file locking, data security, and efficient disaster recovery features.
Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.
In our AI initiatives, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) plays a significant role in data analysis, data fusion; principally, it is involved in data analysis, data extraction, and statistical analysis.
Single files are limited to four terabytes in our configuration, however, the system can support up to 16 terabytes, so we can scale based on that too.
The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection.
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
Ranking in NAS
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (2nd)
Nasuni
Ranking in NAS
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (1st), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (14th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (10th), Cloud Storage Gateways (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is 17.5%, up from 17.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 5.1%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Scott Taylor - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Barry Sunanan - PeerSpot reviewer
It helped us save 40 to 45 percent on some types of data
It can provide a 360-degree view of your data, depending on how you implement it and whether you're storing your data in Nasuni. However, if you're working with multiple cloud providers, I don't think it's mature enough to provide a 360-degree view of what's in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I think it can do it, but it's still a lot of scope and range fitting. Given that Nasuni storage is actually cheaper in some areas, it made sense for us to move a lot of our data away from Microsoft. Nasuni gave us more of a 360 view of that particular data type. Other data types are a little different because the company went in a direction where they wanted to store some stuff in an AWS S3 bucket rather than a file storage system. An S3 bucket has its advantages, but if you were to store more of your data in Nasuni, you would get a wider 360-degree view of it rather than on several cloud providers. I have data in AWS, Google, and Azure, and I would like to see a wider view of all the data stored across these three top providers. Currently, I use it for AWS and Azure, but I couldn't use both of them at the same time. I think Nasuni could have better visibility across these different areas. I had to take my data out and then do some analysis to get the costs. It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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)?
It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wants something inexpensive, there's PowerVault. The system is marketed for mid-ra...
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. So far, the system is adequate as a whole. Perhaps if there was a local chatbot b...
Does Nasuni have a good pricing model?
Based on the experience of my organization, Nasuni is definitely worth the money, since it gives you an all-in-one solution where you'd usually need several programs. About the cost, there isn't a ...
Is it easy to restore files with Nasuni?
As someone who has used this feature of Nasuni I can tell you - yes, it's good for file recovery and you'll definitely benefit from very quick times. I can't tell you if it's the best one because I...
What features and services does Nasuni offer?
Hi, if you pick Nasuni, you'll be benefiting from many services for a good price. Well, it's a personalized price you get after an agreement with the company but in my organization's case, it is a ...
 

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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,
American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.