Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage comparison

Sponsored
 

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)
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), File and Object Storage (1st)
 

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.
Rifat Rahman - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Offers reliable performance and availability for large deployments
I would like to see improvements in Red Hat Ceph Storage not because I necessarily think it needs improvement, but because I generally prefer to do things manually rather than following the containerization part. Current deployments are based on containers, but I deploy manually with my scripts and controls. If there are no Kubernetes-like requirements, I often prefer to deploy a whole manual process. I don't ask for improvements in the deployment model because Red Hat has its own philosophy about making things, but it's my personal choice that I prefer things manually. Some features are available only in the containerization part, so if those are also available in manual deployment, that will help.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We only have storage provisioning, so the provisioning feature is good. The compression and deduplication are good."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"Their REST API is wonderful, well-documented, and easy to use."
"I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) helps improve the way the organization functions through massive scalability, high performance, a single file system, high availability and reliability, flexible protocols, support for NFS, SMB, HDFS, strong security, cloud integration, efficiency, data protection, snapshot, queue, and sync queue, optimized for unstructured data."
"It is stable and very user-friendly."
"Customer service is absolutely satisfying, rating at least nine out of ten, as they have managed previous issues well."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"My experience with Dell as a vendor is pretty good; they are probably one of the best in the industry."
"On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten."
"Since it can scale so easily, as long as I have money to buy more nodes, I can grow it as big as I need to. That is important in our business. As sequencing technologies continue to evolve, and as those technologies evolve, the amount of data generation never gets smaller. It just always seems to get bigger. This is one of the absolute key aspects: We can grow on demand without having to forklift stuff."
"The community support is very good."
"Replicated and erasure coded pools have allowed for multiple copies to be kept, easy scale-out of additional nodes, and easy replacement of failed hard drives. The solution continues working even when there are errors."
"Stratus allows more reliability than all the other types of computers available."
"radosgw and librados provide a simple integration with clone, snapshots, and other functions that aid in data integrity."
"Without any extra costs, I was able to provide a redundant environment."
"I really like that Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used as a total solution without any storage area network components."
"The most valuable feature is the stability of the product."
"Ceph was chosen to maintain exact performance and capacity characteristics for customer cloud."
 

Cons

"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"Organizations with security concerns that prevent cloud utilization would benefit from a wider range of instruments available for offline operation."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"We've had it in place for about a year and a half and have had zero complaints, other than that box-to-box replication is not encrypted."
"One requested enhancement yet to manifest is the scheduling of snapshot replications."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."
"I would make Dell PowerScale (Isilon) better by improving SmartSync in the graphical user interface. Currently, everything has to be done through the command line, and I prefer having a graphical interface."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit expensive compared to other products."
"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."
"Pricing is an issue. It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"Geo-replication needs improvement. It is a new feature, and not well supported yet."
"It would be nice to have a notification feature whenever an important action is completed."
"Rebalancing and recovery are a bit slow."
"In the deployment step, we need to create some config files to add Ceph functions in OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Glance). It would be useful to have a tool that validates the format of the data in those files, before generating a deploy with failures."
"An area for improvement would be that it's pretty difficult to manage synchronous replication over multiple regions."
"The storage capacity of the solution can be improved."
"We have encountered slight integration issues."
"The licensing cost is excessively high. This is a significant issue from my perspective."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"We implemented Pure Storage FlashArray nine years ago when it was new to the market and obtained it at a preferential price."
"We consume it as a service, and that's actually something we really like, or at least I really like from the technical perspective. That's because it means there is no hassle when we need to upgrade arrays to add capacity. We just interact directly with technical counterparts, and we say, "Hey, we're filling up," and they say, "All right, here's another data pack." They ship it in, and we install it. So, the as-a-service model has worked very well. Given the outstanding data reduction rates, it has improved our profitability because we're selling allocated volumes as part of the cloud service or recovering those costs from our tenants. It is very efficient, but that has offset the premium price. It started out that way, but over time, as we've added capacity, the price per gig has gone down a lot because we have a lot of it."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"We feel that the pricing is fair and the licensing process was easy for both."
"The solution could be cheaper."
"Once you purchase Pure Storage FlashArray it is all-inclusive, you receive all the licenses needed."
"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."
"The price of the solution is high."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."
"Pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Dell PowerScale is an expensive solution compared to other products like Qumulo."
"Dell PowerScale is expensive on the start-up side but we can recoup those costs quickly by not having to reapply the savings to other equipment."
"We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it."
"The price of this product isn't high."
"Most of time, you can get Ceph with the OpenStack solution in a subscription​​ as a bundle.​"
"The operational overhead is higher compared to Azure because we own the hardware."
"If you can afford a product like Red Hat Ceph Storage then go for it. If you cannot, then you need to test Ceph and get your hands dirty."
"We never used the paid support."
"I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten."
"The other big advantage is that Ceph is free software. Compared to traditional SAN based storage, it is very economical."
"There is no cost for software."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File and Object Storage solutions are best for your needs.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
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
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

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...
How does Red Hat Ceph Storage compare with MiniO?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ceph Storage?
The high availability of the solution is important to us.
What needs improvement with Red Hat Ceph Storage?
Areas of Red Hat Ceph Storage that have room for improvement include more promotion. Many people do not know about th...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon
Ceph
 

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,
Dell, DreamHost
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Red Hat Ceph Storage and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.