No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Dell PowerScale vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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
5.9
Dell PowerScale offers cost-efficiency and scalability benefits, though some face user adoption challenges and higher initial costs.
Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.
Chief Executive Officer at Orbital Virtual Studios
Despite being more expensive than Huawei, it is stable and most enterprises accept the price due to its stability.
Senior System Engineer at Atlas Security
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.
Storage & Data Protection Specialist at General Dynamics Land Systems
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Dell PowerScale support is responsive and knowledgeable, but users report delays with first-level assistance and varying engineer efficiency.
Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
Associate Business Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.
Senior System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's technical support a ten.
System Support at City of North Las Vegas
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Dell PowerScale offers seamless scalability, enabling growth and efficient data management with flexible on-premises and cloud integration.
Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
We started on PowerScale with around about 300 terabytes and are now two and a half petabytes, still on the same file system.
Storage Architect at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
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.
Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
As an unstructured data storage solution, writing into it and accessing it from the other nodes is highly scalable with no issues.
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Dell PowerScale excels in stability, reliability, adaptability, near-perfect uptime, and effective data protection, despite occasional support issues.
Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.
Associate Business Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Even if a node goes down, other nodes can respond and provide data back to the user without issues.
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
I can confirm that we have experienced six years of zero seconds of downtime.
Technical Engineer at the company in service is
 

Room For Improvement

Dell PowerScale requires better pricing, intuitive interface, easier deployment, enhanced performance, security improvements, and advanced cloud and AI integration.
StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
Firmware or software updates become effortless with Pure, but with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we must evaluate or conduct trial runs to ensure that these operations will not harm our customer's system; their software is not adequate.
Senior Ai Architect at Logicalis
It should be made more user-friendly in the sense that if I manage it, I should be able to deploy it without having to have a lot of interaction from support.
Manager, Information Technology at a transportation company with 11-50 employees
Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I believe its governance and security are more important for financial or government sectors, so governance and security will require additional upgrades and hardening.
Storage engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Dell PowerScale offers high pricing but justifiable value for enterprise users due to features, scalability, and flexible licensing.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
It's quite expensive for the amount of storage we have.
Senior Infrastructure Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Cheaper nodes will cost less, while higher performance nodes will be pricier.
Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group
Costs align well with what it delivers, making it a fair price for a powerful tool that meets all our needs.
Tv Systems Technical Supervisor at a media company with 501-1,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Dell PowerScale offers scalable storage, multi-protocol access, efficient data protection, and user-friendly integration for diverse workloads.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
Dell PowerScale offers high scalability and stability as well, making it a valuable solution for enterprises.
Senior System Engineer at Atlas Security
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.
Senior Technologist at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Systems Engineer at Unisity LLC
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale
Ranking in NAS
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (1st)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Ranking in NAS
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (35th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 12.9%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Storage Appliance is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale12.9%
StarWind Storage Appliance1.9%
Other85.2%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Santosh Bharadwaj Rangavajjula - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
File sharing has supported collaboration and disaster recovery but security support still needs work
Dell PowerScale can improve specifically for AI workloads, particularly on the MCPs. I would add that we have not seen an official MCP from Dell PowerScale and are relying on open source. It would be valuable to have an MCP server that we can set up directly with them. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security could be better. We have Superna that we buy along with Dell PowerScale, but we are seeing very big problems with integrating it. Superna is primarily for the security use case, as we want to prevent cybersecurity attacks and ransomware attacks. If Dell is providing this as a supplementary feature, it should provide better support. Regarding Dell PowerScale's AI capabilities, I do not see much accuracy and reliability of output. This is actually a security problem because Dell does not provide official MCP servers while most other vendors are providing it. This forces us to rely on open source, which is not secure. Dell PowerScale plays a role in my organization's AI initiatives as we want to use the Metadata IQ functionality from Dell PowerScale; however, there is not enough support and extensive documentation for us to be able to do this.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Assistant at Bharat Electronics Limited
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Construction Company
14%
Transportation Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise70
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
I think the price is reasonable. We procured this during the time of COVID, around 2022, and the price was very competitive. If you are looking for technology, there will also be a price associated...
What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
The disadvantage that I felt is not hardware-related. I feel that Dell needs to focus on the service aspects. Once they sell this hardware to customers, customers also expect service from them. Del...
What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?
Dell PowerScale is used for keeping our company data. Continental is an automotive company, and we keep recording files on a petabyte basis. We have globally around more than 200 petabytes of Dell ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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,
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerScale vs. StarWind Storage Appliance and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.