Mar 12, 2020
My recommendation is to take a close look at our CS Concerto Scale-Out Cluster system.
NetApp FAS Series and Dell PowerScale are two prominent storage solutions in the enterprise category. User reviews suggest that NetApp FAS Series has an edge in pricing and support, while Dell PowerScale is noted for its wide-ranging features.
Features: NetApp FAS Series is renowned for its high reliability, seamless integration with environments such as VMware and OpenStack, and robust features like snapshots, data protection, and deduplication that enhance efficiency. Dell PowerScale offers advanced management with OneFS, superior scalability, and excellent performance, supporting various protocols and ensuring robust security and cloud integration, which distinguishes it in functionality.
Room for Improvement: NetApp FAS Series could improve performance monitoring, automation, and cloud integration, alongside enhancing cost efficiency and SAN support. Dell PowerScale may enhance load distribution, cloud integration, configuration simplicity, and pricing clarity.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Typically deployed on-premises, both solutions have private and hybrid cloud adoption. NetApp FAS Series is praised for its effective support and proactive monitoring, although faster response times are desirable. Dell PowerScale is noted for scalability with customer support improvements suggested in technical support responsiveness and configuration ease.
Pricing and ROI: Considered costlier, NetApp FAS Series still offers substantial ROI through its feature set and storage consolidation. Dell PowerScale, perceived as expensive, especially for high-capacity needs, delivers ROI via efficient storage management and features like deduplication, necessitating careful pricing structure evaluation.
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.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
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.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
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.
As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues.
I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as perfect.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
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.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier.
Costs align well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
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.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Dell PowerScale (Isilon) | 15.4% |
| NetApp FAS Series | 10.5% |
| Other | 74.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 20 |
| Large Enterprise | 43 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 31 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 58 |
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?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.
NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.
NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).
The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.
NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features
NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:
Reviews from Real Users
NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.
Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”
Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”
We monitor all NAS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
