Dell ObjectScale Reviews

We are using version 3. It's deployed on-premises. We are using it as a DR as of now. We have the Isilon in our environment, so we are taking the tertiary backups to this ECS just for disaster recovery purposes. It's secondary storage.

We are increasing our usage. Our primary storage is growing, so we have to go to secondary storage to cope with the data. We refresh it almost every six months or one year at least.

Because it's secondary storage, users don't have direct access to it. Only the storage administrators have access to it for any DR or any recovery, but the primary storage itself is used by around 17,000 people. It's one of the largest Isilon clusters in the UK. It's around 106 nodes.

It's definitely good for unstructured data. In earlier days, we had Centera, so for the DR, it's really good. It has a load balancing facility, and we're using it with the Kemp Load Balancer.

The disaster recovery could be improved because there should be something in-built within the ECS. Search and recovery should be in-built. Right now, we have to use some external tools for performing the recovery itself. For example, we're using Atempo or deploying Golden Superna, so it has dependency on the external third-party vendors.

Currently, there aren't any pain points with this solution, but there have been some in the past. From the Golden Superna perspective, one pain point was that we weren't able to deploy it successfully. Dell, which provides this solution, was not able to deliver it successfully. The problem was that they deployed the Superna Golden Copy for the recovery purpose, where we create the buckets for the file-level recovery. But the solution itself was deployed on one of the VMs, and the problem was that we were told that this VM where the Superna Golden Copy was setting itself would only direct the Isilon to replicate or take the backup to the ECS directly. However, later on, we were able to discover that this was not directing itself. All of the data had to travel through the VM itself. There were a lot of issues in that case because we were going to face a bottleneck in our production environment, and we discarded that.

I have been using this solution for a year and a half because we deployed it last year in the TRL environment.

I would say it is stable. I don't think there have been any issues so far.

The scalability is good. We are scaling it now, and we're going to add another two nodes in the next two months.

Dell support is very good.

I have experience with Centera, which is also a Dell product but the old one. That's also an object storage kind of solution, but that's an absolute technology now. I know of the technology on the cloud as well, like the NetApp StorageGRID, which is the same technology as the object storage.

Deployment was not complex, but the solution itself wasn't mature. They have provided the solution, which they have not tested in the multiple environment itself.

Deployment took around two to three months. There was a project team working with us. The hardware was applied very quickly. It wasn't very difficult, but the main structure, which was Golden Copy or the Atempo, took two to three months.

It's a lease-based model, so it's capacity-based. We already negotiated the price a lot, but we're still doing that with Dell because somehow the product was not installed successfully, so there was a lot of struggle in the distributor territory between Dell and the environment itself. I would give the solution a 6 out of 10 for the pricing. There's a little room for improvement.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees.

I didn't evaluate any other options because I didn't directly choose this option; it was the customer. But because the majority of the landscape was occupied by Dell, we had to go for the ECS only. They tried to put something on the cloud. We explored some options with the customer, but that didn't work out well because they wanted something on-premises, and for the on-premises, we had only two options: ECS or StorageGRID, or we had to go for the Equinix Data Center, the core location data center.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. It's a good solution. If someone doesn't want to go on the cloud, then this is the best solution that we have in the market right now. It's reliable and stable.

There should have been some POC done by the vendor itself. Either it should have been done for a small chunk, but a POC should have been done before implementing it because I don't think they have many customers as of now. My environment has some external dependencies, like Superna Golden Copy and Atempo, so that might be why they are facing those situation load issues.

We primarily use the solution as an archive storage for our documents.

The compliance mode and such things are the most valuable aspects.

It has been stable. 

The scalability is good.

We're happy with the interface.

It integrates well with APIs.

At the moment, I don't feel like we have to improve anything. 

When the system goes down, then the compliance mode will not be all over the system. The system will stop working. They need to ensure that the system will work if a site goes down. That said, we have yet to have a site outage.

I've been dealing with the product for four years. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. The performance has been good. 

The solution is scalable.

We have about 2,000 people using the solution. 

Technical support is good. 

We worked with the EMC Centera product previously. Dell EMC announced the end of life of the Centera assistance, so we changed to ECS.

The setup for us was pretty easy and pretty hands-off as we had outside assistance. 

We implemented the solution a long time ago. I'm not sure how long the deployment itself took.

Normally, maintenance will be provided by Dell EMC. You call and then Dell EMC will do the upgrade and so on.

The setup was done by an external consultant. We don't have so much to do with this setup.

I can't speak to the exact pricing. 

I use the product. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're a customer and end-user.

I have a few customers using Dell ECS.

Dell ECS is a Security Information and Event Management(SIEM) solution.

Dell ECS could improve the price of the solution. It is expensive.

I have used Dell ECS within the last 12 months.

Dell ECS is stable.

I have found Dell ECS to be scalable.

The support from Dell ECS is better than NetApp.

I rate the support from Dell ECS a nine out of ten.

I have used NetApp previously, and Dell ECS is a better solution.

Dell ECS provides useful conversion guides for the implementation.

The price of Dell ECS should be reduced.

I recommend the solution to others.

I rate Dell ECS an eight out of ten.

Dell EMC ECS is the leading storage area network, you can do anything with it. Some companies have 10,000 users, it depends on the structure.

The technology is very good, it performs well.

It is a good solution, except for the cost.

I have been using Dell EMC ECS for 15 years.

The stability is perfect.

Dell EMC ECS is an enterprise solution. It works for small, medium and large enterprise organizations.

Technical support of Dell EMC ECS is fine as long as you are paying your licensing for both software and hardware. If you are paying for higher level support you will receive higher level support.

I have worked on all enterprise storage solutions.

All storage is different. You need qualified people who understand storage to install it.

The solution requires a qualified competent technical team to install it.

Dell EMC ECS solution is expensive. It requires an annual subscription, monthly will not work for the user or for Dell.

This solution can be for everybody. You need to assess your own needs. Dell EMC ECS covers solutions across the board. You can't go wrong with a universal leadership product.

I rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We installed it last year at a customer site.

We use it for archive and for backups, our third copy backups.

The storage is cheap.

It's easier than tape. We use it instead of tape now. 

We've found the solution to have good stability.

The product can scale. 

It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward. 

Technical support seems to be pretty helpful.

The issue we have is the solution is doing a system Read-Only to only 90%. Instead of 100%, you get the read-only at 90%. It's hard to explain to the customer that, "your system is full, you only have it at 90% full, however, yes, that's considered full even though you have 10% left." You should be able to calculate so that when it's full it's 100% full, not just 90%. 

I've worked with the solution for a little over a year. 

The solution feels pretty stable. We have not had any issues with it, aside from discs now and then. We have about six petabytes. It's a lot of discs, that we have, and only a few have failed. it's a small number in comparison to the big picture. We've been running it for a year pretty much without incident. 

The solution is more suitable for larger organizations as opposed to smaller companies. 

It's a product that is easy to scale. 

It's been working fine and therefore we haven't used technical support that much. We use it when we expand the system with more notes, and for the GEODrive. We might have some questions about that, however, overall it's been pretty good and problem-free.

I've been working with storage for 20 or 30 years or something like that. I've been with IBM, NetApp, and other EMC products before Dell. I've had experience with HPE, 3PARs, and Nimble. I've used pretty much every storage product on the market.

The difference depends on basically the customer and what they have from the beginning. Each product has its positive attributes. It depends on what the customers are going to do with it. We have other archive products that are at least as good as the ECS.

While the initial setup looks pretty straightforward, we didn't actually do the implementation. 

There are things in the background that are running, of course, however in terms of maintenance requirements, it's not that much.

In terms of pricing, for the performance it gives, it's quite competitive. It's not the best performance, so you get what you pay for, however, if you want performance for, for example, a file server, or something like that, ECS is not the right product. That said, the pricing also depends on the customer and how much discount they get, et cetera. There are different licensing models. 

I'm a consultant. We're a partner and reseller.

We are using the latest version. We just updated it in August or September. 

I'd advise new users to buy enough nodes for the performance so that you calculate the performance correctly, as that can be an issue for some.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. For how we use it, we are quite happy with its capabilities.

We create a service for our customers to access EMC Storage.

We use this product for an on-premises server to access the EMC storage. We locate our EMC in our IDC center, and we provide our enterprise customers access to it. 

We sell this service, space, and AWS SAN storage.

This product is very competitive. It's a good product.

In Taiwan, they don't have professional technical support. They don't have many channels or distributions to provide professional services.

They only provide preventative services for themselves. It is very difficult for us to resell this service to our enterprise customers because EMC doesn't have many resources. This is an area that needs to be improved. 

Our customers need EMC for their Big Data services.

This product is very competitive but the professional services need to be improved. 

Also, the price could be reduced. We need more marketing activity in Taiwan, as it would be very helpful in trying to resell this product.

I have been selling the latest version of this solution for six months.

It's a very stable storage solution.

Because we wanted to provide our enterprise customers with a multi-tenancy service, but they don't have the multi-tenancy architecture, they can only use it on-premises at one company. We contacted Dell EMC ECS and we created a scenario for the mechanics to build out a multi-tenancy service.

This is something that was not originally provided with Dell EMC ECS.

Dell has a very poor support channel in Taiwan. They sell the models directly to our enterprise customers. They don't have a very good vendor support system. 

We need to start it ourselves, then we can provide it to our enterprise customers.

Dell EMC ECS is too expensive.

We plan to continue selling this solution, but we need them to support it on more than just a case by case basis because it takes too long. 

It depends on the Dell EMC resources but we cannot rely on their distributors for help. It's not a good enough business model.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it. That said, there are a few improvements needed, including that it could be cheaper.

I would rate this product a seven out of ten.

The tool is easy to use. 

Dell ECS needs to improve its performance. 

Dell ECS is stable. I rate it a seven out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a five out of ten. My company has 2000 users. 

The tool's support is good. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. I recommend it since it is reliable, stable, and easy to use. 

We use the solution for archives and unstructured data.

It is a good product. The performance is good.

The initial setup is not so easy.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

The tool is very stable.

The tool has unlimited scalability. We have one architect and a few enterprise engineers on our technical team.

The initial setup is not so easy. However, we have the skills. We can contact Dell’s engineers for remote deployment. They provide a service called ProDeploy. It is an expensive option, so we prefer not to contact them. If something goes wrong, we can involve the engineers.

The product is quite expensive. The vendor provides us with discounts, though.

We compared the solution with HPE and NetApp. Dell ECS is cheaper than HPE but a little bit more expensive than NetApp.

Our company hasn't sold the solution yet. However, we designed several projects and have at least two in progress. We have certified engineers and architects to draw and design everything. Currently, we have a project for archiving photocopies of tax reports. I recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.