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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.5 out of 5

65 reviews
96% willing to recommend

840 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) offers easy management and workload consolidation, excelling in scalability and data handling even at petabyte levels. The platform provides business continuity, security, and seamless integration. However, it's costly and best for larger setups. Replication, NFS support, and small file handling need refinement, and finding skilled personnel is challenging. Dell PowerScale's advantages include high density and security features, though potential buyers should consider the pricing and specific business needs carefully.

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 known for its scalability, allowing for easy system growth without the need for restructuring clusters.

It provides efficient storage utilization by spreading data across all nodes, offering high performance from the entire pool.

The inclusion of features like ransomware protection and file lock retention enhances security and recovery capabilities.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) supports various data workloads and ensures high availability, combining performance with significant storage capacity.

Users appreciate the low-maintenance nature and stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), noting excellent customer service and technical support.

CONS

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) can be expensive compared to alternatives, prompting concerns about its pricing structure.

Configuration and deployment processes are found to be complex and cumbersome.

There is a need for improvement in customer service and technical support, particularly in addressing hardware failures and support issues.

Encryption and replication processes are areas where enhancements would be beneficial, especially for managing large data volumes.

Enhancements in object storage capabilities are needed to meet evolving storage demands.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Pros review quotes

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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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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High-Performance Computing Services Manager at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited

Jan 26, 2022

The most valuable feature we started using, beyond the initial scope for the solution, is the multi-protocol system that allows you to access the same set of files using different network protocols like NFS or SMB. PowerScale’s Unified Permission Model ensures that data security and access permissions are honoured regardless of whether the client is a Windows desktop or a Linux server

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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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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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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KB

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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RB

Chief Operations Officer & Acting CFO at Like a Photon

Mar 4, 2021

PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale.

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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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reviewer1852437

Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

May 4, 2022

I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node.

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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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Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Cons review quotes

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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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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High-Performance Computing Services Manager at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited

Jan 26, 2022

The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol. At the present, you cannot protect access to data via HTTP or HTTPS the same way that you can secure data access through other protocols like NFS or SMB[...]the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply.

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Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.

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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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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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KB

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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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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reviewer1852437

Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

May 4, 2022

That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins.

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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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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 63)

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)

MinIO vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Dell ECS vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

NetApp FAS Series vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Nasuni vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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Qumulo vs Dell PowerScale (Isilon)

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