Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

We're using 95% of data for user access and 5% percent for the NFS mount point. We're a startup and customer of Dell. 

It's helpful that we're able to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters. We started with a very small footprint and now we have 30 nodes and recently expanded an additional eight nodes on the cluster. We can create multiple storage pools from this if we decide to add a location within the cluster itself.

We're struggling to find the NIXI protocol. It's for people needing to access using Windows and Linux. We're struggling with the UID mapping and how to configure mapping-related things. I'm looking at how to map those GIDs and UIDs. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. If it's being used for the NAS protocol, it's very stable.

The solution is very scalable. 

We have direct Dell support only.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have 4,000 users in the company who are accessing the shared drive without any problems. Maintenance can be done by one person. 

We have a five-year contract with Dell. We get new hardware each time we renew the contract and the cost is calculated on a percentage-wise and scalability basis. Every five years, we replace the tech nodes. 

If you're looking for a product to use for an assembly protocol, this is the best solution on the market.

I rate this product nine out of 10. 

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve the load distribution capability. For example, in some cases, the system load is not distributed automatically on all the nodes but is concentrated only on one. You have a peak request on only one node and the others don't do anything.

In an upcoming release, the solution should have security features embedded, not external software.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for approximately nine years.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a reliable solution.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is scalable. It is easy to expand capacity.

Most of our customers are enterprise-sized companies and the solution is suitable only for companies with a lot of data. For example, you can have a start-up company dealing with a large amount of data, but only have 10 people working on it. In this case, you will need a solution with this capability.

I am satisfied with the support.

If you have used the solution previously then the initial setup of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy, if not then it is difficult. If you have good planning and preparation then the implementation can take two to three days.

We do the implementation of this solution for our customers.

The price of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is reasonable.

My advice to others is they should work with a provider that knows the solution well and the features in order to implement it correctly.

This is a good solution but it is not always the best choice, it depends on the use case.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) an eight out of ten.

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.

We use this solution to facilitate sharing data access across multiple platforms. We are a children's hospital and have a lot of PHI data that is critical to keep secure. 

One of the benefits that we have seen from our research department is quotas and chargeback. They are able to control costs based on the projects that they're given and the grants that they receive from the state and federal levels. They are able to track the quotas and chargebacks, which is made possible through Isilon.

Implementing Isilon has removed the previous silos that existed between different teams. Everyone has been able to virtually separate their resources, but still store them physically on the same box.

PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually.

Isilon also makes it possible to delete large amounts of data and fix active directory permissions. Previously, we would have to create scripts and run them manually. It also reduced our risk of data loss and gave us the ability to recover from snapshots and replicated data.

We have data that is accessed from multiple OS from different models and in departments in our company. The ability to serve up that data to all those different platforms is very useful.

One of the best features of Isilon is its reliable performance and ability to report on its performance. Reliability is really important in our environment, with a 24/7 shop that serves patients. In many instances, data access is critical.

Prior to Isilon, we had to access data from multiple different platforms. This solution offers unified storage and the ability to consolidate and migrate data which was a big step forward. It allowed us to cut costs by eliminating multiple platforms, putting it all on one array.

Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file.

I have used this solution for eight years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This solution's scalability in an on-premise environment is impressive. We continue to throw large workloads at it and performance has been pretty stable. It has multiple nodes, which is useful when we have outages or code upgrades. We're still able to perform those without interruption of service.

The EMC field support is great. They're easily accessible. We have a specific person we call which is invaluable. We are able to open tickets online instead of spending hours on the phone, no matter what day or time. The only challenge we sometimes experience is a language barrier. 

Positive

The initial setup for this solution is complex. The F900 uses Dell PowerEdge Servers instead of the traditional nodes. We needed to disable memory allocation features on those servers. When we did that, with EMC support, it brought the cluster down and it was down for a couple of weeks. 

The deployment involved a storage analyst, data center analyst, and EMC staff. The data center analyst handled the power requirements and cabling requirements. There are 15,000 users across multiple sites. 

This solution requires three people to handle maintenance. Maintenance requires verifying whether jobs are successful, identifying failures, and ensuring that replication is occurring correctly.  We do regular creation and deletion of shares, files, and folders.

We are able to better handle and reign in budgets by making departments responsible for the data that they are consuming for the grants that they get. The deduplication of data has freed up some of the storage costs that we've traditionally experienced. Some of the newer technology allows us to store more data on less equipment, which means that we're using less footprint in our data center.

This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication.

We evaluated Pure Storage but their support was unreliable. We need fast and reliable support, and EMC has always proven that when we have an outage, they're there to help us.

The user interface is very simple to use. Support is critical when deploying this solution. When we were deploying the F900, there were a lot of problems that were beyond our scope. We frequently needed to touch base with system engineers from EMC. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

PowerScale (formerly Isilon) is effectively a giant NAS. We have two clusters, one for production workloads and one for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity purposes. These clusters are installed in separate data-centers, physically located in two different places in the country. Both clusters were deployed at the same time when we first adopted the solution, and we have been growing them at an almost equal rate ever since.

Our production cluster is attached to our High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, and this was the primary use case in the beginning: to provide scale-out storage for the Bioinformatics team, who do omics analysis on plant and seafood organisms that we do scientific research on. As time went on, we expanded our use of the platform for other user groups in the organization.

Eventually, PowerScale became the de-facto solution for anything related to unstructured data or file-based storage. Today, we also use the platform to host users’ home directories, large media files, and really any kind of data that doesn't really fit anywhere else, such as in a SharePoint library or a structured database. Nowadays, almost everyone in the organisation is a direct or indirect user of the platform. The bulk of the storage, however, continues to be consumed by our HPC environment, and Bioinformaticians continue to be our largest users. But we also have data scientists, system modellers, chemists, and machine-learning engineers, to name a few. 

Our company has multiple sites throughout the country and overseas, with the two primary data-centers supporting our Head Office and most of the smaller sites. Some of these sites, however, have a need for local storage, so our DR/BCP PowerScale cluster receives replicated data from both our production cluster as well as these other file servers.

Before PowerScale we used to have a different EMC product. I believe it was VNX 5000, which is primarily a block storage array with some NAS functionality. We did not have a HPC environment, however we did have a group of servers that performed approximately the same function.

Back in those days, raw storage had to be partitioned into multiple LUNs, and presented as several independent block devices because of size limitations of the storage array. When one of these devices started to run out of space, it was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming to shift data away from it, which slowed down our science. We wanted a solution that would free our users from the overhead of all of that data wrangling. Isilon was a good fit because it enabled us to effectively consolidate five separate data stores into a single filesystem, providing a single point of entry to our data for all of our users.

PowerScale helped us consolidate our former block storage into a full-fledged, scale-out, file storage platform with great success. We then decided to expand our use cases further, replacing some of the ancillary Windows File Servers that provided network file shares in our Head Office. We now have a single platform for all our unstructured data needs at our main locations.

We have not explored using PowerScale cloud-enabling features yet, but it is in our roadmap. The fact that those features exist out of the box, and can be enabled as required is another reason the platform is so versatile.

The switch to PowerScale was transformative. Before we implemented it, users had to constantly move their data between different storage platforms, which was time consuming and a high barrier of entry for getting the most of our centralized compute. Distributed, parallel processing is challenging enough, to add data wrangling on top of it created massive cognitive overload. Scientists are always under pressure to deliver on time, and deadlines are unforgiving. The easier we can make leveraging technology for them, the better.

We officially launched our current HPC environment shortly after we introduced Isilon, supporting approximately 20 users. Today, that number has grown 17500% to over 350 users across all of our sites. In an organization with nearly 1,000 employees, that's more than a third of our workforce! I credit PowerScale as one of the critical factors responsible for that growth. PowerScale simplified data management because it allows you to present the same data via multiple different protocols (eg: SMB, NFS, FTP, HTTP, etc), tremendously reducing our users’ cognitive overhead.

Before adopting PowerScale, we also faced capacity constraints in our environment. I had to constantly ask end-users to clean up and remove files they no longer needed. Our block data stores were constantly sitting at around 90% utilization. Expanding the storage array was not only expensive: every time that we wanted to provision additional space we had to decide if it was justified to re-architect the environment versus adding yet another data store. And going with the later option meant going back to our users again to free up space before more capacity could be added. All of this wasted massive amounts of time, that could have otherwise been spent running jobs and doing science.

Once we introduced scale-out storage, capacity upgrades and expansion became straightforward. The procurement process was simplified because now we can easily project when we will hit 90% storage utilization, and our users have visibility of how much storage they are individually consuming thanks to accounting-only quotas, which help keeping storage usage down. PowerScale provides a lot of metrics out of the box, which are easy to navigate and visualize using InsightIQ, and most recently DataIQ.

I can certainly recommend PowerScale for mission-critical workloads, it is a powerful but simple platform with little administration overhead. We use it in production for a variety of use cases, and it would be hard for our organization to operate effectively without it.

When we selected Isilon as our preferred storage provider, many considerations came into play, but the deciding factor was how little administration it requires. We no longer need a dedicated storage administrator looking after it. Instead, our Systems Engineers can handle the day-to-day operations without requiring in-depth expertise in storage management. The simplicity of the solution was a strong selling point when we first started looking into it. For example, when you have replicated clusters, you must ensure that you can actually failover between them in the event of a disaster. PowerScale makes setting up and checking the status of replication schedules extremely simple.

Over time, we started using more and more of its capabilities. I believe 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. Our users can now access the data they need for their research, without having to deal with multiple credentials depending on the environment they are using, or having to rely on specific clients. The same file can be opened and edited from Windows Explorer or from the Linux command line, and we can guarantee that the ownership and permissions of that file will remain consistent. It reduces friction and cognitive overhead, which is what I value the most.

Data security and availability are also included in solution, out-of-the-box. Of course you still need to be aware of how to configure the different features to your use case, but from a data security and availability perspective, you can leverage replication schedules, snapshotting, increased redundancy at rest, and all of those features which we now consider a must-have. With PowerScale, I can have piece of mind that if a specific directory needs to be protected, it will be protected.

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. You can either access a file because it can be access by anyone in the organization, or you cannot at all. There is no in-between. HTTP is not considered a first-class data access protocol, so the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply.

However, with the recent introduction of S3 starting from OneFS 9, I believe the necessary plumbing is already there for HTTPS to also be elevated to a first-class protocol in the future because both protocols sit behind a web server under the hood. It does not sound like it would be too complicated to implement, but it would be a valuable feature and it is currently missing.

We started exploring storage solutions for our environment back in 2012. We have been using PowerScale for nearly 10 years now.

PowerScale has never failed us. Since it was first installed, it has been running with almost 100% uptime since we started using it. We have only had to shut down the entire cluster once because we were moving data-centres. In earlier versions, sometimes you had to reboot the entire cluster for significant OS upgrades. Today, rolling upgrades are the norm, where only a single node is ever down at a time.

At the beginning, we procured four initial nodes, which amounted to about 400 TiB of usable space. We now have just shy of 2 PiB of total installed capacity at each cluster. Our storage usage has grown quite a bit, moving from terabytes to petabytes, but I have no doubt that we will be able to continue growing at the same rate or even more in the future. The original Isilon had already been designed to scale to multiple petabytes, PowerScale will only continue to push that further. We highly value being able to grow our capacity without having to be concerned with platform limits.

PowerScale now also offers more choice when it comes to mixing and matching different types of storage nodes within the same cluster. For example, you can get all-SSD or NVMe nodes alongside old-fashion SAS disks, that you might want to consider adding when performance is critical in your environment. In our case, the performance we get without these new nodes is sufficient for our needs. The best part is that should we ever need to provide a faster pool of disks, there is no administration overhead to do so: just add the new node types, set the tiering rules that you want, and let the system rebalance itself. No partitioning, no moving data around yourself. It is transparent to the end-users as well as the administrators. You can even tier data to a cloud pool for the archive if you want! This simplicity is, again, one of the main reasons we decided to stay on the platform.

I needed technical support on a few occasions, specifically while implementing multi-protocol access for Linux and Windows clients. There was an instance when my engagement with support had to run for longer than I expected, but that was because the solution I wanted to achieve was highly complex from a technical perspective. We had to escalate the issue a few times to the next tier of engineers until they came through with a solution. It was always an excellent customer service experience, and I can certainly recommend Dell EMC Support to anyone who asks.

That said, we only tend to contact Support when we are unable to resolve issues or find the answers with need in the product knowledge bases, or the community forums. The availability of product information online is both comprehensive and of excellent quality.

The initial setup was straightforward. Since it was a green-fields implementation, we did not run into any issues. EMC, who later merged with Dell to form Dell EMC, even let us evaluate the platform in our own data-centre, so by the time we decided to procure the solution, all we had to do was to revert to “factory settings”. The longest part of the process was migrating around 84 TiB of data from our old data stores, as it happens with any data migration exercises. But once the data had been relocated, it became a matter of simply pointing the servers to the new data store entry points. Users were happy to take it from there, and were certainly overjoyed at the additional space they had to work with.

It was a long time ago now so details are fuzzy, but we dealt with EMC directly, with the help of an integrator for some of the initial design and implementation. EMC was our primary point of contact for platform-specific support when we first started, and their guidance around the different features of the platform was invaluable.

Today, that same integrator continues to help us with ongoing procurement, simplifying decisions around which of the many available node types might be the best suited to our environment, or ensuring that we stay on top of our node refresh cycle as older ones reach end of life.

Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market.

The licensing model is interesting, because it is essentially “pay to unlock”. Most of the available features are software-defined, so they are already available in OneFS, the underlying Operating System, waiting for you to activate them as needed. There are a few additional costs, however. NDMP backups require you to install fibre cards, which are sold separately. Then of course you have the cost of tape and off-site storage, but you would have those same costs with most other platforms. Luckily, we do not need to back-up the whole cluster because we can rely on cluster replication and snapshots (on both source and target clusters) to achieve our RPOs. But we do have a legal requirement to preserve some data for an extended period, so we use tape for that.

We evaluated three other competing solutions based on multiple criteria. Some of those solutions no longer exist, or have evolved into a different offering. We went through a rigorous evaluation process, which assessed the platforms’ scalability, ease of use or complexity to administer, performance, and of course TCO. Isilon was the brand name that blew all others out of the water. It was an easy decision for us to make based on the criteria we set.

I give Dell EMC PowerScale a high 9 out of 10. It is not quite a 10, mainly because we do not have a use for all the features it provides, which you need to be aware of from a security point of view (eg: to ensure that they do not introduce unexpected risk). The ecosystem has also grown to be somewhat more complex in terms of the many different types of nodes that you can have. This gives you a lot of flexibility, but it does go slightly against the idea of simplicity that was so attractive initially.

I use the solution in my company for our customers who are from the media, and as per the vendor, I can say that the tool is scalable for data storage.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the unlimited scalability. The tool has high availability and high storage capacity. The tool also offers flexibility in connection.

My company uses the tool's basic features, and some of our organization's customers moved to the product after seeing its functionalities. Our customers only use the scalability offered by the product for storage purposes, along with whatever the vendor provides as an extension for the tool.

As the product is used for basic purposes, there are not many areas in the tool that require improvement. The product is just fine for now. My company does not use many of the features of the product. I can tell what my customers want to improve in the product, and I believe that they don't want anything to be changed in the solution.

The support offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. My customers don't receive much support. The support has slowed down a bit. For Vietnam, the support has to be worked on since it is slow in our country.

I have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for three years. My company has a partnership with Dell.

It is a stable solution. We don't have issues so much with the stability part. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

My company's customers are from the media involved in games and movies.

For scalability, there is just a need to connect to the right connections.

My company's clients are medium-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support team is slow in Vietnam. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

The product's initial setup phase is taken care of by the engineers from the product side, so my company does not have much experience in it. My company gets a deployment service from Dell, so we don't need to configure anything as everything is already configured. We just need the information for the configuration, though it is all completed for me.

The solution is deployed on the private cloud.

The solution can be deployed in a day.

The product cost is affordable. It was not very high and not too cheap.

Speaking about the integration part, just mapping the NIS server is enough. An NIS server can be integrated with the tool, making it possible to share parts with the client.

In the media, there is a need to switch files without connecting to the internet, so on the website, they don't use much of anything. Customers move the data to Dell PowerScale, especially the things they can't just use over the internet. We don't use AI for now.

The biggest benefits experienced by the users of the product revolve around the fact that the tool offers scalability.

I can recommend the tool to others.

If you have more data to store and need to scale up, then I recommend that you use Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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.