


Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Zadara compete in the data storage solutions category, offering a range of capabilities to serve various business needs. Although both have their strengths, Dell PowerScale excels in on-premises environments while Zadara offers superior cloud-oriented functionality, making it the favored choice for businesses with a strong cloud focus.
Features: Dell PowerScale stands out for its impressive scalability and ease of management, offering features like SmartQuotas and CloudIQ monitoring. The solution provides multi-protocol support, allowing seamless data access. Zadara differentiates itself with flexibility in deployment across hybrid and public clouds, robust data redundancy, and customizable drive options. It offers integration capabilities and a single-tenant model for enhanced security.
Room for Improvement: Dell PowerScale could benefit from improved object storage support and a streamlined update process. Load distribution and security features are areas noted for potential enhancement. Zadara could improve its object replication speed and refine its management interface for smoother operations. Both solutions can enhance their patch updates and cloud integrations.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerScale is widely adopted for on-premises deployment, often praised for its strong technical support. Zadara offers broad applicability with its hybrid and public cloud deployments, though its customer support receives mixed reviews. PowerScale's setup is known for robust support engagement, while Zadara provides scalable cloud-compatible solutions.
Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale, with a more traditional pricing model, is considered worthwhile for its comprehensive offerings despite its high cost. Users report positive ROI through centralized management. Zadara's pay-as-you-go pricing is straightforward, potentially more economical for scalable solutions. It avoids hidden costs, with users highlighting its flexibility and pricing alignment to ROI.
Operational tasks such as provisioning storage and monitoring performance happen faster, and less downtime risk and hardware consolidation mean we support more workloads with fewer resources and less data center overhead.
We have never had an outage in my four and a half years, but in our company's ten or eleven years, there has never been any planned upgrades that required downtime.
In the long term, spanning three to five years, the total cost of ownership becomes cheaper, considering power consumption, data center footprint, and NVMe technology usage.
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.
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 cost is not cheaper compared to AWS, and we have not seen the expected return on investment.
Pure's support organization is responsive with minimal bureaucracy, making support a key factor in customer retention.
I would rate the technical support an 11 out of 10.
Everpure FlashArray is probably not cheap storage, but it provides great performance, scalability, and everything a customer needs.
Support online is definitely a ten out of ten.
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.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell's technical support a ten.
We lack adequate response times and a 24/7 service level agreement.
I rate the technical support from Zadara as nine out of ten.
A big banking client had around 300 petabytes of data on Pure Storage.
Our customers can scale up or scale out, raise the performance, and expand the storage spaces by investing every year.
We have successfully upgraded the controllers, scaled capacity, and scaled arrays without much impact on the system and with seamless planning.
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.
Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use.
For stability, I rate it a ten out of ten.
We have continuous 99.9% uptime and do not experience any users reporting performance issues due to latency.
The vision Pure Storage FlashArray offers through the GUI is clearer; we can discern the status, what is cabled, and how direct flash is enabled.
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.
Integrating object storage into the FlashArray would benefit entry-level and SMB customers by offering a more unified solution.
Storing cold data on expensive arrays doesn't make financial sense, and tiering to any of the big three cloud providers would be advantageous.
As a technical professional, I lack visibility into the system logs.
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.
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.
Hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline.
Adding AI capabilities could enhance the offering as well.
Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs.
They're expensive.
While they say it's free, we actually pay for support upfront.
Some smaller organizations may find it slightly expensive, but for enterprises, when considering performance, future hardware investments, and overall benefits, it is a very cost-effective solution for mid and enterprise organizations.
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 is considered expensive.
FlashArray's integration with the Pure One instrument provides a centralized platform for efficient management of all arrays.
Another noteworthy aspect is their platform, Pure One, a cloud-based analytics platform that automatically creates a case and sends out a part if a disk or controller fails.
It handles internal data migration seamlessly in the background without going offline, achieving a hundred percent uptime.
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 most valuable feature is its storage management capability.
Zadara's troubleshooting feature is very valuable for me.


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 71 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 38 |
| Large Enterprise | 159 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 53 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 12 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
The FlashArray family delivers consistent, high-performance data services across block, file, and object workloads. As part of the Everpure Platform, it provides the foundation for a unified data plane, enabling applications to reliably access, protect, and manage data across environments with simplicity and predictability. With built-in capabilities such as inline data reduction, snapshots, replication, and ransomware resilience, FlashArray ensures efficient operations, protected data, and consistent application uptime.
As the foundation of the (unified) data plane, FlashArray enables policy-driven automation, monitoring, and centralized management while integrating across cloud and on-premises environments. Built on an Evergreen architecture, it supports non-disruptive upgrades and continuous performance improvements over time while simplifying operations at scale.
What Key Features Does FlashArray Offer?
What Benefits Should Users Consider?
In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.
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?
What benefits should users consider when reviewing 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.
Zadara integrates cloud solutions with low latency and a pay-as-you-go model, offering user-friendly scalability and IOPS performance. Its robust features such as single-tenant experience and dedicated cores make it an essential choice for enterprise storage needs.
Zadara is designed for seamless cloud integration supporting major cloud vendors. Its offerings include dedicated cores and hybrid drive options within a scalable environment. Providing managed services, Zadara is adaptable with predictable pricing. Its reliability is enhanced by iSCSI service, supporting fault tolerance and data management across data centers.
What are the key features of Zadara?In industries managing large-scale data storage and disaster recovery, Zadara provides a foundation for secure and efficient data handling. It supports managed service providers with infrastructure solutions, including backup and disaster recovery, enabling seamless off-site storage and maintaining business continuity across different sectors.
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