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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.4 out of 5

76 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is known for its manageable interface, saving time by consolidating workloads and simplifying management. It offers exceptional scalability, allowing seamless expansion by adding nodes. Its single pane of glass feature eases storage control, making data handling straightforward. Inline deduplication improves storage efficiency. Despite its strong security and support, complexities in setup, high pricing, and needed improvements in analytics and data management pose challenges for users unfamiliar with the technology.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is extremely easy to manage and offers significant time savings by consolidating workloads and simplifying management.

It provides excellent scalability, allowing for easy expansion by adding nodes without disrupting operations, which is critical for growing data demands.

The single pane of glass feature offers valuable storage control and ease of use, benefiting IT management and end-users by simplifying data handling across platforms.

Inline deduplication and compression have significantly improved efficiency, offering an economical storage solution that enhances employees' productivity.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) supports both file and object storage with powerful security features, providing a reliable and stable storage environment with strong support and observability.

CONS

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not suitable for small environments or small customers, and it can be complex for those not well-versed in the technology.

There is a need for improvement in replication processes, encryption in transit, and the management of large data volumes.

Pricing is higher compared to other systems, leading to calls for cost reduction.

The current setup and management require a high level of technical knowledge, which poses challenges for users.

Reporting and statistics functionalities need enhancement, particularly in the areas of analytics and metadata reporting.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Pros review quotes

Solution Consultant at Swisscom

Nov 13, 2019

The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature.

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reviewer1267071

Senior Consultant at a tech company with 11-50 employees

Aug 19, 2020

The stability of the solution is good.

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Director of IT at NatureFresh™ Farms

Apr 21, 2022

The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed.

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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RP

Ryan Parker-Hill

System Team Leader at Deakin University

Oct 22, 2020

The solution has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. Rather than managing all the different workloads on different storage arrays, Windows Servers, etc., we just have one place per data centre where we manage all their unstructured data, saving us time.

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reviewer1444710

Information Systems Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Oct 29, 2020

It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door.

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BS

Senior Vice President, Product Development & Strategy at EarthCam, Inc.

Nov 1, 2020

For maximizing storage utilization, PowerScale is great. When you write the data to it, it spreads it out to all the nodes, so you get all the performance from the entire pool.

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MD

Maurizio Davini

CTO at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 18, 2020

This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use.

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GU

Network Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 30, 2020

There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great.

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JL

CIO at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

May 30, 2023

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.

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AH

Anthony Hallett

Geo-computing Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Dec 16, 2021

Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT.

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Cons review quotes

Solution Consultant at Swisscom

Nov 13, 2019

The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers.

Read full review

reviewer1267071

Senior Consultant at a tech company with 11-50 employees

Aug 19, 2020

The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology.

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Director of IT at NatureFresh™ Farms

Apr 21, 2022

There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things.

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Free Report: Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

RP

Ryan Parker-Hill

System Team Leader at Deakin University

Oct 22, 2020

The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement.

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reviewer1444710

Information Systems Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Oct 29, 2020

It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems.

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BS

Senior Vice President, Product Development & Strategy at EarthCam, Inc.

Nov 1, 2020

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.

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MD

Maurizio Davini

CTO at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 18, 2020

Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us.

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GU

Network Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 30, 2020

Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern.

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JL

CIO at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

May 30, 2023

The thing that they are working on now, and we are following closely is more native cloud integrations. The way that we envision workloads in the future is around moving compute to data instead of the other way around. So, we would like to have a single pane glass to manage storage across a variety of different platforms, including native cloud. That would be awesome.

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AH

Anthony Hallett

Geo-computing Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

Dec 16, 2021

The management and monitoring tools comprise a disparate suite of products and the roadmap is very unclear. We've got four different products that look after the Isilon, management-wise, and it's a bit of a mess.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 73)

Product Categories

Product Categories

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Product Categories

Product Categories

File and Object Storage

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

MinIO vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Dell ObjectScale vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

VAST Data vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Nasuni vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

NetApp StorageGRID vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

See all alternatives

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