Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

We used it originally for archiving our video storage, and then we expanded it to include user shares. All of our unstructured data has been moved to PowerScale.

We have now expanded the OneFS to start to use Local S3 Buckets, that use the same API setup as Amazon, but lets us host the data onsite.

In addition we added Power Protect Data Manager that is allowed to backup the Shares and stores, allowing us to have a backup of everything on another location.

We moved our shares over. Now, instead of taking up a large amount of space on a virtual machine, our shares take it up on one appliance. The load on that virtual machine is much less and it makes it easy to future-proof it, because now we don't have to move it again in the next migration of servers.

We have saved about 30 percent on storage with it. And as we grow, we get more space, meaning the efficiency improves each time we add a node. We went from 75 percent efficiency to 82.5 percent efficiency when we expanded.

The solution provides us with the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. That really is nice. We did one use case where we put it out at the edge, and it was nice to have the Isilon at the edge. It really helped improve things. It helped the storage of the cameras, and it helped get the data back to the core in a reasonable time. It allowed us to go from the edge to the core and then up to the cloud, instead of trying to go from the very edge to cloud.

PowerScale also allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It simplifies the storage. It allows us to see everything as one large volume instead of having multiple volumes all over the place.

And when it comes to the business value of our data, it allows us to see what's being used and how it's being used, and we can do so much more quickly and efficiently. As a result, we can better evaluate how we're storing the data.

It has also helped us to reduce data silos. We used to have four video servers out there, all storing data. On the home farm, now, we're down to one server storing data in one location, and that includes all the user shares. 

All our data is in one place and that has increased performance. We could never afford to say, "Let's have this information on solid-state," and allowed the OneFS to decide, based on usage, of where it would be stored: on a fast drive or on a slow drive. It automatically does that in the background for us, instead of our having to manually move it and then have the user change where they get the information from.

In addition, it has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. It's all done in the same portal now. And while it hasn't reduced our number of storage admins, it has definitely reduced the time we spend looking at it, so we can focus on other efforts. It saves me about five hours a week.

Another benefit is that it allows us to focus on the data rather than where it's stored. Now, we don't have to worry about moving it around from place to place to get efficiencies out of the data. We just have it all in one place. The single interface, the SmartPools policy, decides where it needs to reside.

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, as well as the access users get. But the end-user doesn't distinguish the difference between a file and its folder; the end-user doesn't have to see the difference.

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. There are no performance issues based on how large the storage is.

Adding a node is as simple as racking and stacking the items. It takes about two to three hours to put it into the rack. Once you have it all wired up, it takes you about an hour or 90 minutes with Dell, just to configure things and make sure it's all working. Then you just redefine your policy for where you want the items stored. We just expanded to include the solid-state, a full F200 node, and we just redefined where we wanted those files stored, whether on the super-fast solid-state or on the slow archival mode. Then, overnight, it ran that script and moved all the files around to help increase performance.

We also use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. It gives us better insight into where the data's stored and the access times involved. It gives me a better understanding of what's really being accessed and helps me decide what I can move to slower drives first, and what needs to stay in the front-end and remain very fast.

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.

The refresh of the interface with version 9.3 did help a lot of the things. They are at least improving it.

I have been using Dell EMC PowerScale for about a year and a half.

It's very stable. It's one of the first solutions that I feel comfortable working with during the business day, while people are using it, knowing that I can change things and it's not going to take the system down.

One of the things I like the most about it is the fact that we can scale out now. If we need more space, we order more nodes and it just changes the file structure; it just expands. There are no more individual drives, new arrays, moving things around. It'll just be there.

The future-proofing of what we're doing is a great thing too, because in five years when we're ready to replace that node, just due to its age, we can put the new one in and tell it to archive the old unit. It will move all the files over, in the background, and then we will just remove the old unit. There's no more having to tell users that, "Oh, this whole share is moving and all this stuff is getting done."

The technical support has been really good. It's pretty intuitive to put a ticket in, both through their email and through the calling system. It's usually pretty seamless to get to talk to somebody to actually resolve the issue.

Before PowerScale it was just MD Storage Arrays, the standard, and the LUNs that you'd have anywhere. We eliminated that with this. We originally started with PowerScale for our video system. We were looking for a better system, in the long-term, to store our archival video and process it. We looked at unstructured data solutions and picked PowerScale for that and for the future-proofing.

Also, because we are a large Dell EMC shop, it allowed us to keep it all on the same platform. In looking to do things on a larger scale, it allowed us future compatibility, much more easily. Its ability to meet unpredictable future storage needs looks great. It feels like a great solution and it was the right direction for us.

The first setup was pretty complex and a little different to do. Once we had the core system set up, the next deployment was much easier. The complexity came from changing our thought process, internally, regarding how we store files and how unstructured data really works, and then, how to efficiently use this.

Our deployment took about a week. We did a slow move-over, and we still continue to move anything we find over to it.

In terms of administration of the solution, for the most part it's just me who does a lot of the core work. All the users on the farm are using the system now, meaning about 350 people are accessing the data on the Isilon.

We used the reseller, Dell EMC, for the deployment, and it was a great experience. They were there to help us and make sure we understood where we were going and what we were doing.

The fact that, with PowerScale, we could start with a few nodes and scale very large made it very cost-efficient for us. It allowed us to start out, see what it can do, and evaluate the product before we actually did a larger investment in it. We invested into it again three months later.

I'd like to say we have seen ROI because we're feeling like we're really starting to store data better and understand what's going on, more than we did a year-and-a-half ago.

It's one of those situations where you have to find the right price for you. When we talked to the reseller, we were able to negotiate the right price for what we needed.

We looked at HPE and IBM.

I liked the interface of the PowerScale much better than the other ones. It was more intuitive. I logged on and could almost get to work with it right away. I felt like I could hop on and just start using it, whereas with the other ones I felt that there was a larger, steeper learning curve.

Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution's OneFS operating system. The last addition was its CloudPools and that allows us to do backups to the public cloud for the data that we want to keep but don't even need on-prem anymore. It turned the system into a never-ending resource. We can now decide what we want to keep, long-term, without having to expand our storage system.

PowerScale is one of those things that will grow in your environment. Once you start it with one thing, you'll learn that it can do much more, very quickly. That's a great thing about starting small with it, you can expand very quickly later on.

Our primary use case is unstructured file storage. It is pretty simplistic and architected in a very simple way.

The product centralizes all of our subsurface digital data. It also includes normal PDFs and Word documentation that we have. 

Centralizing our data with the Isilon has helped to take the pressure off of our IT department, without having to move around our 32 old file server systems. In general, it has made our operations more efficient.

We use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance remotely, although it represents a very small part of our storage operation.

Dell regularly adds new features and one of the recent upgrades promised performance improvements, which was a big draw. At this point, I can't confirm whether or not there have actually been any improvements noted. The SyncIQ features are changing dramatically to be a bit more flexible in the future, which is something that I'm keen to see.

This solution allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It's not something that took up much time before so it hasn't had a large impact, but it's good that we don't have to do it.

Using this product has enabled us to maximize the business value of our data because now, we can store all of our data in one place. This means that we have the agility of recalling large volumes that we would otherwise have had on hard drives in different places. Initially, we didn't have the storage required to hold all of the data together, and now, it's coming more into play as we look into dashboarding and TIPCO. We can now look at our data as a whole, instead of in little parts that were as such because of limitations we had in storage. 

This solution has helped eliminate data silos. At the moment, we only have subsurface data on the unit and don't have any production data. However, it's helped us to be able to compile our data and expose it to the company. In this aspect, it has stopped data silos.

We have been able to consolidate our workloads, meaning that our storage management has been simplified. Having it all in the same place, not having to expand it all the same, and not having to rejig our backups has made it easier to work with.

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

An important feature for us is scalability.

This product gives us a backup system with everything online, which is a big win for us.

Having an on-premises solution like Isilon is better for us than a cloud-based solution in terms of both price and performance. Price-wise, moving to the cloud is an unknown cost, as opposed to a known one. Performance is affected by latency because the cloud data center is between 3,000 and 3,500 kilometers away. This distance has a significant effect on latency.

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.

We have been using the Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) devices for approximately three years.

The stability has been rock solid. We've had two incidents; one of those was its fault and that was in the very beginning. It was resolved within a reasonable timeframe. The other incident was external switching.

So, it's not been without some problems, but in the time we've had it, that's nothing significant.

This product is expandable and it scales well. The scale doesn't change how you administer it. Whether it's a megabyte or a petabyte, it's all the same when it comes to managing it.

We added a node and it is easy to do. We simply asked, paid for it, and it was done. When choosing this product, it was somewhat important that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large.

This product will be able to meet unpredictable future storage needs with ease.

This is being used in a single department with no plans for expansion.

Technical support has been alright and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Prior to having the Isilon, we had multiple file storage systems. We used to have 32 old server file systems and in conjunction with Dell, we came up with this solution as a way to consolidate them into one centralized storage.

Before Isilon, we really didn't have a solution, and now we can focus more on data management rather than storage management. All of our subsurface data was spread over the existing servers. We had an issue where we couldn't go over to terabytes because it affected the backup, so we always had to move data around and some of our projects were starting to span over to terabytes, and that was causing a headache.

With Isilon, we don't have that problem anymore and we're not shifting data around. It's all in one spot. We're not unloading hard drives and loading hard drives onto the system. We just unload them once and keep them there and then they get tiered appropriately.

The initial setup was straightforward. We leveraged Dell entirely to implement it, and it took between two and three days to deploy.

Without the help of Dell's ProDeploy Plus, it would have taken us weeks to deploy.

We used ProDeploy Plus, which is Dell's implementation service that is available at an additional cost.

One storage engineer is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

We have seen a return on investment, although intangible.

One of the reasons we chose this on-premises solution is that it's a known cost. In our case, lifting to a cloud-based solution was an unknown cost and in the current environment of tight budgets, having a known cost is a huge benefit.

We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it.

We did not evaluate other products in advance of choosing Ipsilon.

This product provides policy-based automation for managing storage, but we don't use automation in our use case. Similarly, it provides support for the S3 protocol but it is something else that we don't use.

In our use cases, the data remains where it is and doesn't go anywhere. We don't use any of the edge or cloud features.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to purchase the extra support from Dell to deploy it. This is what we did and if anybody else is going down that path then I'm sure they'll be fine.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for storage in a scale-out data processing system.

It is a physical storage platform. We have several different nodes that all act as one large storage cluster.

PowerScale has allowed us to bring data acquisition and some of the initial data processing that we would typically do in the field here on-premise. That has let us speed things up from a data delivery standpoint. 

It has let us really optimize our consistency. We've been able to take something that several different people were doing out in the field and just maintain it here with one person able to do a really good job of making sure that our data quality is very high and that our consistency in processing is a lot more static. It has prevented quite a few possible issues, which has also allowed us to expand from some of our jobs, where we used to go and acquire this data in the field. The systems out there have three servers, and we're able to expand up to 10 or 12 servers all processing that data. Therefore, it's made our turnaround on data pretty quick.

PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It makes it to where we don't have to have a full-time storage guy on-premise. We are able to manage our storage on PowerScale without needing to have a team. 

The solution does provide us the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. However, that is not something that we typically do, as we have a fairly large cluster. We did have one instance where we had a very large job that was going to require about two petabytes of data. We were able to purchase that and get it installed pretty quickly, which definitely helped us out.

It is simple to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. We have almost three and a half petabytes, and it's a very low impact to our team as far as the amount of effort and babysitting that we have to do on it. This has really changed the way our company can acquire and process data in the field, allowing us to differentiate ourselves against all our competitors. None of the other competitors in our market are able to handle jobs, either in the size or density that we have been able to do so far.

PowerScale allows us to focus on data management, rather than storage management, getting the most of our data. This is mainly because the system almost manages itself. Instead of having to sit and handle storage volumes, RAID groups, LUNs, or things that in traditional storage architecture our group would have to manage, we are able to just create shares. The end user side is able to access those shares just like they would any regular storage or file server. That really helped us make sure that we're not having to manage storage the way we would with a traditional block storage or any other storage that we've tried so far.

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.

It has the ability to access the file system from multiple hardware platforms from a client perspective. We have Linux and Windows machines able to access the same file system, then we also have the ability for all those systems to be able to access the same data at pretty much the same time. That helps us quite a bit, as it lets us expand the number of processing nodes that we can use to access the data at the same time. This helps us to scale out the front-end data processing to speed things up quite a bit.

We do have some of the policy-based tiering that seems to be working fairly well.

As far as we can tell, it does a really good job of maximizing storage utilization. For us, the storage protection is a bit more important. The protection schemes that we have seen so far have been very effective at ensuring that our data is protected, while still being able to access as much as possible. That is one of the strengths of the OneFS software.

It definitely helps us maximize the value of our data. We don't necessarily try to get any insights into it other than we just acquire the data and process it on our client's behalf.

We have been able to consolidate and centralize our systems into one system. It lets us take data from the field and get it in one spot, where it can get quite a bit bigger. It also has a lot more processing systems to access our data and get it out the door a lot faster.

Simplify where you can. If you have a need for tiering, then that can be okay, but it can behave in ways that you may not expect. If it's at all possible to simplify and stick with one node type, your consistency will definitely stand up a little better. If you do have a workload where tiering makes sense, PowerScale does do a good job of that. That's the only real, "Gotcha," that we've run into.

We are probably on our seventh or eighth year of using PowerScale now.

We have had a few issues here lately, as far as power and kind of unusual things in the building. We've been really surprised that PowerScale was able to work around those issues without any sort of data loss, when we have had multiple nodes go offline. After we got everything back online and running again, PowerScale worked without any issues. As far as resiliency and availability go, I am happy with the solution.

PowerScale lets us scale into much larger projects than we have ever been able to do. As far as I know, that is actually what sets us apart from our competition, as they aren't able to do projects as big, dense, or high resolution as what we are able to do.

We didn't have any storage administrators previously. However, from what we've seen on other systems, they would require them. Without growing our staff or expanding, we have been able to just bring this solution on without a lot of impact to the staff that we already had.

We have a small number of actual people using it. It's mostly just different computers accessing it. We have anywhere from 60 to 200 different computers accessing it at any given time. We have a small compute cluster that sort of skews the numbers into that 200 range. Right now, we have 95 connections going into it across our different systems.

We have had no issues at all with our technical and customer support. The product watches after itself. If there is a hard drive replacement or anything like that, it phones home and Dell EMC lets us know. So far, we have had good luck getting equipment out and getting service on anything that we've needed.

With all the other file systems that I have worked on in the past, if you had the three point four petabytes that we have right now, then that would require at least two people to work on them in a mostly full-time capacity. Because of the PowerScale's simplicity, we're able to just let our infrastructure team manage it, and it's a really low impact to them. Right now, we've two people who manage it along with all the other storage and networking that we have on-premise.

We have added a node to the solution. We added 12 of the H500 nodes to our cluster about a year and a half to two years ago. The process was really painless. We just physically installed the hardware, so rack it and stack it up, then make sure the hard drives are in place and the network connectivity is there. Once we started powering them on, we were able to quickly add them into the cluster, and the extra storage and performance were apparent very quickly.

The initial set up was straightforward. It was similar to adding the hardware where we just kind of rack and stack and get the back-end and front-end networking configured, then we have pretty much everything right there.

The initial deployment was a lot smaller. It only took a day to a day and a half before we got it going. It was only a 300 terabyte cluster at that point. 

Our vendor helped us out with the deployment, so they were able to send one or two of their engineers (depending on whether it was the addition or initial deployment). One person can do it, but two or three people will help get it done pretty quickly.

I think we have seen ROI.

The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past. 

It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems. I do think it's worth the value, but it's definitely not cheap.

We were looking at large scale storage platforms. We had a good relationship with our storage vendor who recommended this solution. So, we took a look at it and did a bit of a demo, working with our software vendor to ensure everything was working fine, then just went out to the races at that point.

We did not evaluate other options in a side-by-side comparison. We did look at a handful of other vendors. However, we were able to tell just by the specifications of what they had that they weren't really going to work for what we needed. We needed to be able to scale the storage quickly, and also have Windows and Linux access to the same data set.

It was critical for us that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large. That was one of the things that really cemented that decision for us to go with PowerScale. We started out with the 300 terabyte system and were pretty sure at the time that the jobs that we were working on were going to get quite a bit larger and would need to have more crews acquiring that data. We were really planning on being able to grow this solution right from the get-go.

The people whom we have talked to about large-scale storage have typically rolled their own with either Ceph or Gluster. However, those require two or three full-time staff which we are not going to be able support.

We have been really happy with it. It is one of the few areas in IT that we don't have a headache. We've liked everything that we have used so far with it. We have been very happy with the feature set that it has right now. It's definitely serving our needs.

We have been using the solution since version 7. It fits our use case without us having to add new features on our side. I don't know that we have necessarily seen or needed very many of the features that they have added.

We have the ability to grow or speed up our cluster easily by adding or replacing new nodes. That makes me pretty confident that if we have a significant change in our data, whether it's the number of crews that we have or number of client servers that we need to deploy, then I'm very confident that PowerScale can handle it.

We have massive unstructured data. It's only used to keep up with our data growth.

Its scalability has been huge for us. Before that, we were using Windows File Servers and there were a lot of labor-intensive log-on activities to build all those servers. With Isilon, we just add nodes and grow capacity. We realized those benefits as soon as we had Isilon online.

We love the scalability with OneFS. It is a one-file system that just grows. It is able to keep up with our massive data and ingestion.

We don't use applications on Isilon, however, it manages the growth of our data and structured data.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is okay. It does the job. I didn't really think about it in terms of protection with its resiliency and its ability to grow.

It's important that PowerScale helps us secure data from cyber attacks, however, budgets control everything we do, so we can only use it as far as what our budget allows.

We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us and we'd love to have one.

We would like to see both performance and security improvements which are in all of the releases. We haven't leveraged S3 yet, however, at some point we're going to leverage S3. We're working towards the 9.0 releases. Therefore, we'd like to see some improvements in the protocols. 

I've been using the solution for five or six years.

OneFS seems very stable. I just wish support would get a little better. I realize with COVID 19 it's been hard to keep people.

The scalability is awesome, this is why we have it. 

There are challenges when providing economies of scale for a large cluster, however, it's nothing. It's hard to quantify that because it is just a cluster, but we've been pleased with the scalability overall.

In the past year, it hasn't been as great. They seem to just follow KBS. Prior to that, they were awesome. I'm hoping they get it together.

Negative

We just used Windows File Servers before Isilon. We didn't have any NAS to speak of. We might have used NetApp, however, that's not a scalable solution. We evaluated others and we chose Isilon.

It is very straightforward. It's a little complicated setting up, however, other than that, you just allocate file shares and maintain security patches, and management is easy. It's pretty similar to other systems. It's very straightforward once it's set up.

I deployed it myself. My implementation strategy was to just do it. I have a template that I modify for every deployment and I rack it a certain way so that we can manage the backend cabling, which is a really big deal. I rack it, set it up, and configure it.

We have it in our major data centers, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I do all the maintenance which includes dealing with failed hard drives. There are always errors popping up. I'm just keeping ahead of all the little things that come up, engaging with support, and so forth.

I did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. I did it myself. 

We have seen an ROI. For example, we don't build Windows File Servers anymore and that eliminates that labor. We have massive data growth and it helps us keep up with adding nodes. However, we have no quantitative numbers for that to share.

The pricing seems reasonable to me. We always evaluate new storage platforms and we've stuck with Isilon.

The costs involved purchasing the hardware licensing and extending maintenance. However, that's with every product.

We haven't really looked into PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection.

We have some Gen 5 and Gen 6 nodes, and we have five clusters. We just purchased the newer Gen 6, A3000, and H700 nodes in our Phoenix data center.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If there was better support I'd give it ten out of ten.

It's an awesome product. I'd advise others to evaluate all the products and just pick the one that's best for them.

Things are in the details and I've always paid attention to that, however, you have got to handle deployment carefully and think ahead to what could go wrong. If you do that, everything will be fine.

The solution provides file-based access for everyone. It's a simplified platform for user-based access to files. It's also very simple to do data center replication for disaster recovery with Isilon.

It's hard to think back to the beginning when we actually got it and how it helped us improve. Of course, it is leaps and bounds over any Windows-based file share that may have existed back in the early 2000s. However, it's really helped engineers manage and maintain it. It's a very simple platform to work with.

The file-based dumping for SQL backups is great. We use that fairly heavily, especially with the flash-based nodes on Isilon. It's been our go-to platform for user-based file access.

The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is great. We integrate and have Avamar-based backups with Isilon. The protection is great.

Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center.

Cyber security, including ransom protection, is good. We haven't really leveraged a lot of those features as we should. We know that they're there and we work with our partners to help us implement those pieces for us.

The impact PowerScale has had on our organization's storage efficiency is positive. It's tough to talk about efficiency, as we love using it and we dump everything into it. What it retains gives us a great DD compression on the array. We find ourselves overusing it, however, we do have it plugged into Cloud IQ. That helps us with alerts to let us know when we're getting close to our thresholds for capacity.

PowerScale has helped us free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. They're not spending a lot of their time managing user files. Everything's managed from the array itself.

PowerScale helped reduce our overall risk. It helped us reduce our overall risk mainly due to the fact that we're replicating between data centers. We don't have to worry about a single point of failure within our data center. I can check on the health of our arrays really at any time with CloudIQ, and everybody sleeps better at night.

If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal. They have immutable snaps that they can leverage, however, it would be nice to have something folded in with CyberSense where we could detect points in time when we need to do recovery for anything that may be compromised.

We've had Isilon for many generations. I'd say we've used it for the last eight to ten years.

We have had issues with internal load balancing between some of the shelves. That is an ongoing issue that support is trying to address. We're still waiting on a resolution for that, but that's really been our only issue with the stack that we have.

We haven't had any issues with technical support.

Positive

In terms of what we used before, I can't remember that far back. If we did it was probably some sort of Windows-based file share that was all manual controls. It's hard to compare what we used in the past as we did not switch from another vendor.

I was not directly involved with the initial development of the solution. My involvement was just the management of the storage engineers managing the system. We like to keep everything in the Dell ecosystem so it was easy enough for us to turn it over to the storage engineers.

It wasn't complex at all. Even the upgrades and controllers that we've done have been pretty straightforward, however, we've got two guys today that manage the environment.

It's deployed across two data centers.

The solution does require maintenance. We do continuous controller updates and the like, however, we do it in conjunction with support.

We have seen ROI, however, it's tough to compare since we haven't really looked at other platforms. It's been easier for us to use the platform we have.

The price is reasonable. The ease of use with the array and the functions that we get from it still seems to be better than other products that are on the market today.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's still great, however, there are some internal issues that need to be resolved. That said, I understand it's always under continuous development.

I would advise potential users to not focus on the price tag right away. I know there are other cheaper solutions, however, they may not have the functionality that Isilon has and the same tie-ins that you'll get with the Dell ecosystem with features like Data Domain and Avamar, et cetera.

The product allows us to handle NFS file systems with SMB shares. It's object-oriented as well.

Our major use is for SMB and NFS file exports for the open systems area. Both are heavily used in our company.

PowerScale is used across different platforms to help consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform. We have file systems that are both NFS, and they are being shared with our open systems. However, some are also SMBs, so they can get to it from their Windows systems as well. It's very helpful for our applications.

PowerScale cybersecurity, including its ransom protection, is very important to our organization. I've got a session coming up where I'm going to learn more about that. We had a presentation on that at my work with our technical support group.

The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon. There is just one point of contact there. It's made it easier and more cost-effective.

PowerScale has helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities, however, it's hard to assess an exact number.

It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it.

I'm happy with the product the way it is, however, I like the improvements that always come out with the new 1FS code upgrade.

Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker. 

I've been using the solution for about six years. 

The solution is stable. 

We have 800 people using the solution.

In terms of increasing usage, we're not going to implement it elsewhere, however, we always have new employees coming on.

Technical support varies depending on the person you get.

We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore. We tried to use it and it comes up saying, "No one is available."

It used to be easy. We would get on the chat and we could solve something within an hour. Now, we have to open an SR and wait for somebody to get back to us.

Positive

We previously used an EMC product, however, I don't remember what it was called. It might have been Virtual Gateway or something like that. We use that as a front end to VMAX storage. There was newer technology which was why we made the switch.

We have the solution deployed in two locations, in our production data center, and in another disaster recovery data center. We're syncing data between the two and it's used by all our employees. That's where their personal drives are, along with corporate drives and departmental drives, that are off this storage as well.

There are three of us that maintain the solution. It's not a lot of work once it's all set up and running.

We have seen a return on investment in terms of the amount of storage that we have. There are a lot of things watching it, it's very helpful.

I'm not really involved with the pricing. 

Our company is a customer.

We're not using it in the cloud. We are starting to get into the cloud a little bit in our business. We're heavily using it for the NFS and SMB shares.

I'm not sure whether it reduced our risk or not.

We just recently upgraded our Isilon nodes to the new PowerScale nodes.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I'd advise other users that it is cost-competitive. There are other solutions out there. This has an all-flash option as well. If you need the speed without the old flash, that's available as well. However, we have hybrid models of it.

We have to deal with a lot of data, be able to get it across to and from different locations, and be able to store it. We use this solution for these purposes.

Overall, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has made the management of the data and networks easier. Because we are using the same solution for multiple platforms, our personnel have become more efficient.

The fact that we were able to set it up, use it, and, for the most part, didn't have to worry about it after we had it set up has been valuable.

PowerScale's cybersecurity, including ransom protection, is very good. We've never had an issue with it.

This solution has helped free up employees to focus on other business priorities.

Data storage performance needs to be improved.

We've been using this solution for several years.

It's been very stable.

I would give technical support a ten out of ten. We generally don't need a lot of technical support unless something breaks.

Positive

We previously used another Dell product, and we switched because it became outdated.

Deployment usually takes about three to four months. We implemented it one network at a time.

Maintenance-wise, it requires standard stinging and patching to ensure that security is followed.

We haven't lost any data, and that's probably the biggest return on investment, being able to maintain data integrity.

A technical solution has to meet the requirements, and you have to know what you need in order to figure out what tool is going to best work for that.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a good product. It does the job, and it takes care of the data. I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use this solution for the primary file storage for our organization for both the government and health department of Nova Scotia. We use the data domain for backup along with Isilon for our file storage.

This solution offers flexibility in supporting various data workloads and is very easy to work with. It is our go-to solution for all data storage. It is stable, it runs in the background and our users are barely aware that it exists. It operates seamlessly and this is the biggest benefit for our business. 

PowerScale has made it extremely easy to scale file data across our organization. We have two implementations of Isilon. One is a replica of the other. When scaling, we add nodes to each location and expand the cluster. The process is straightforward.

We have eliminated the need for any silos in our data center using this solution. It has also freed up our employees' time to focus on the other business priorities because it is easy to manage and add nodes when necessary. Replication works seamlessly. We are able to meet all of our auditors and governance requirements.

The way it scales easily, is easy to use and its security are the most valuable features. 

It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale.

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is an easy solution to scale. 

The solution's service and technical support are excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Many years ago, before Dell, we used a solution for file sharing and office servers. We moved to storage area networks, and the transition to Dell seemed like the right move. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did receive some assistance from Dell for the setup and they continue to assist us with maintenance on a regular basis.

A reseller assisted us with the implementation. They were excellent. To deploy this solution, we did not require more than our existing operational staff. These three team members take care of storage and backup.

Our biggest ROI in using this solution is the ease and centralization of management. This has freed up team members to focus on other tasks in the data center.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

We evaluated a lot of other alternatives and this solution came out on top. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I would rate it a ten out ten.