Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Reviews

Dell PowerScale helps to capture large amounts of data in a short time. 

The tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content. 

Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price. 

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

Dell PowerScale is scalable. 

The tool's support is good. 

Dell PowerScale's installation is fast. You need one engineer to handle the deployment. Its maintenance is easy because of its high redundancy. 

I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

We use the product for ETA data storage.

Dell PowerScale is a scalable solution. It allows non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance of the system.

The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement. There could be power sizing tools available similar to OneFS or H-Series.

We have been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for three or five years.

Our organization has 100 to 200 Dell PowerScale (Isilon) users. Its scalability is an eight or nine out of ten.

We used NetApp before. We switched to Dell for better scaling features.

The implementation is simple. I am unsure about the deployment time as I work in the pre-sales department. But it might take approximately five to ten minutes to complete.

It is an expensive product with a high storage capacity suitable for large data requirements. They do not have an option if a customer wants to purchase 20 TB storage space.

I recommend Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and rate it a seven out of ten. It doesn’t have an HTTP protocol. There are other alternatives like Unity and Pure Storage with essential features.

We utilize Dell PowerScale for storing files as it is the sole solution that possesses advanced features that meet our customer's needs.

Dell PowerScale can be deployed on-prem and in the cloud but I prefer a Hybrid model and primarily use AWS, Azure, and Oracle.

The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features.

The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement.

I have been using Dell PowerScale for seven years.

I give Dell PowerScale a ten out of ten for stability.

I give Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten for scalability.

The technical support team is responsive.

Positive

The initial setup is easy for an engineer. The time required for deployment, however, depends on the environment. If we're transferring data to existing infrastructure, a few hours should be enough. But if we're working with a new infrastructure, we must first fulfill certain requirements before we can migrate the data.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The price of the solution is high.

I give Dell PowerScale ten out of ten.

We are a Dell partner.

Many of our customers in the banking and parts sectors utilize Dell PowerScale.

Three to four engineers are required to maintain the Dell PowerScale.

I highly recommend Dell PowerScale.

My customers are using the solution in a few areas, such as DFSA and pharma, for their application.

The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together.

The price of the solution could be reduced.

I have been familiar with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for approximately one year.

I rate the stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten out of ten.

My clients have been satisfied with the support from Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

The setup of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not difficult for our team. However, it could be complicated for my clients.

The length of time of the deployment depends on the infrastructure. If there are more servers it could take more time. However, typically it does not take more than one day.

We did the implementation of this solution for our customers.

The price of the solution can fluctuate. The price can be competitive or other times not. The price of the solution could be better.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten out of ten.

We are an integrator. The main challenge our customers have had with this solution is the unstructured data they have coming in. 

PowerScale is flexible in supporting various data workflows and custom applications, from legacy equipment to newer functionalities. 

The solution's cyber security and ransomware protection are definitely a plus. Some of the other key benefits include performance, availability, and being able to have a data lake. It offers a single repository for multiple storage types with access at multiple points. 

PowerScale has the ability to scale data across our business, predominantly in an on-premises environment. We are able to scale to different segments within divisions.

This solution is able to create efficiencies in data storage and provide better control of data environments with an easy-to-use interface. 

This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features. 

PowerScale helps our clients consolidate data storage and multiple applications onto a single platform for easier manageability. By doing this, overall performance is improved and data is better protected. 

The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS. It would be key if this was made possible.

We have used this solution for four years. 

This is a very stable solution and we have not experienced any outages. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer support for this solution is excellent. 

Positive

We evaluated NetApp.

This solution is scalable, fast, and reliable. With the new NVMe technology that has been built into it and the bleeding edge of switches and NVMe, I would definitely recommend this solution. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We connected our mainframe system to Isilon. The NFS is being provisioned from Isilon and hosts millions of files. It is our primary storage solution. 

Isilon is flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. Dell continues to release updates and patches which enhance the use of this solution. This includes offering ransomware protection.

We are working with Dell to implement a cyber security solution, which is called the air gap solution. We also have Dell Data Domain systems. We back up the data from Isilon or any other system into Dell Data Domain. From Dell Data Domain, we offload to the air gap and secure the data into the air gap or Isilon. 

The system is robust. It has had a big impact on the efficiency of our organization. It serves as storage for our core application, which is a revenue-generating application. It plays a key role in our business. 

Isilon has the ability to scale file data, although we have not explored this within our business yet.

The offloading of data from Isilon to ECS object storage has been cost-effective.

Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated.

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer service for this solution is really good. We have a dedicated support account manager and system engineer from Dell who assists us when we need it. 

Positive

We do have another solution that we leverage for our NFS protocols. The other system is a little bit more efficient or robust. We also have protocols that we leverage on the other system. They are really good compared to Isilon.

The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use. 

I'm impressed by the way the system provides scalability. From an administration standpoint, it's really simple to use. The GUI and interface is easy to manage. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We are using it for storage of video files, with casual access to them. We needed as much storage as we could get for the best price. If you are looking for a hybrid type of situation, when you want low latency for transactional things, and higher-latency storage for archival things, you can get the hybrid nodes.

Each of our two clusters has the same disk sizes, etc. We did that for interchangeability, in case we wanted to move shelves between the clusters. They act independently, but they replicate between the two. We love the system. That's why we continue to upgrade and buy it.

The low latency, the high-capacity connections that we have with the nodes, and the ability to add as needed to a particular system, are all important features for us.

It also handles data distribution among the nodes internally. You really don't have to do anything, so management is easy. If you're someone who really wants to get granular and know where every bit or byte is going, maybe it's not for you because I don't know if you can get that granular.

We have over a petabyte of storage and we've sliced it up. You can't really call them "shares" because it's not really like an NFS mount or CIFS share. But we've sliced it up and the policies and auditing on a particular system are, in fact, too much data. Anytime a file change or any system change happens on it, it records it and we ingest that into a SIEM. We can crunch it so we know who is changing what file at what time. That gives us auditing capabilities.

The policy-based management that we have, for who accesses what shares, is relatively simple to set up and manage. It's almost like managing an Active Directory file share.

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.

The OneFS file system is very simple and has an astronomical number of features that allow us to get very granular with permissions, policies, and archiving of data. It handles everything for you. It's one of the easiest storage solutions that we've ever implemented in the 12 years I've been working in this organization.

I also love the snapshot functionality. It's pretty much what everyone does in backup. It's a backup of your system, but it lets you set the frequency of the snapshots. That's very important to us because we take so many snapshots. That means we can recover up to six months back, if somebody makes a file change or deletes a file. It's like a versioning type of function. It probably isn't really special. A lot of backup software has it. But the snapshot functionality is what we utilize the most within the OneFS file system. In theory, you don't really have to back up your systems if you're taking snapshots.

The only problem with the WORM (write once, read many) feature is it does take up more space than if you just wrote a file, because it writes stuff twice. But it works for us for chain-of-custody scenarios, and it's built into the file system itself.

Also, on the PowerScale system, 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. It's the secret sauce of protecting your data and that makes it a little disconcerting for someone who is used to seeing if a directory is using 5 MB of space. So if you have a directory using a terabyte of space, it might be using a little bit more because of the way that the system handles data protection. That is something you have to get used to.

Also, a lot of people are not used to the tagging or the description in the InsightIQ application. We're used to using the normal nomenclature of terabyte, petabyte, etc. They utilize TB byte and PB byte. So you have to understand the difference when InsightIQ is telling you how much storage you have. It's different than what we're used to. It uses base-2 and the world is used to base-10. Discerning how much storage you actually have, from the information in InsightIQ, takes a little bit of math, but it's not very difficult. I wish they had an interface in there where you could click and it would report in the way the industry is used to, which is in terabytes and petabytes. It's nothing major, just something you have to get used to when you're looking at it.

We have two clusters. We purchased our first cluster about seven or eight years ago. We've refreshed that particular cluster, where we traded in the old one and brought a whole new cluster. In the midst of that purchase, we also bought a second cluster where we replicate some files between the two. We just refreshed and upgraded that second cluster, which was probably about five or six years old, and bought a whole new set of A200 nodes for it, so the shelf sizes are the same.

We've had some bumps and bruises when buying new nodes and adding them to the cluster, but I don't think it was the technology that we really had the problems with. It was, unfortunately, Dell EMC support, where we got a couple of Dell EMC engineers who weren't as familiar with the system as we'd like. Once we kicked it up the chain, and we had an engineer that was more versed, they fixed the problem relatively fast.

When we had the first iteration of PowerScale seven years ago, we added nodes to that. This was how that process went: The node came in, it was already populated with drives, you slapped it in, put it into the rack, cabled it up to the networking, and put the networking on the same VLAN, the network backend configuration. Then, you went into the configuration manager, the OneFS file system and you told it about the node. You said, "I have a node that I want to join to the cluster." It brought the cluster in and, for lack of a better term, formatted it, added it to the array, and it was there. The amount of time it took to cable up and join that node was about two hours. Once it's there, the storage just expands.

In theory, and what we expected with the newer systems when adding nodes—and this is the way it does work, once they figured out the problem that they were having—was that it would be the same scenario. You rack the system. If you get the networking done right, which is really easy—you just drop it on—it handles a lot of the internal networking within the cluster itself, but you need to put it on the same external VLAN. If you do that right, the OneFS file system just finds it. You add it, and it just assimilates it into the cluster. Once the networking is done, it should take under an hour for it to get assimilated into the node and for the storage to become available.

Most of the problems we had were when we were adding on. We really haven't had any problems after it was up and running. When it's up and running, it's rock-solid. We never really get failures other than drives failing, because all SATA drives fail. But you just pull out a drive and you slap another one in.

We were using it for video storage and we were pretty impressed with its scale-up and scale-out abilities. We are always looking at the ability of a platform for scaling up and scaling out, especially because it's file storage. This was the best thing on the block that was out there.

In recent months, their backend technical support has waned a little bit. They need to address the first-line technical support. I used to have a lot of confidence in Dell EMC technical support, but since COVID—and maybe it's the COVID situation—the technical support has fallen short a little bit. We've run into some problems with them.

They stand behind their product. The support that I get from my support group and my enterprise management team is phenomenal. When there's a problem, they address it. It may take them a little bit of time, but they own up to it.

But calling in and getting that first-line technical support needs to be addressed. It's been a little bit of a "hunt and peck" when you have issues, as opposed to just coming up with the actual solution to a problem. That's only been the case in about the last nine months or a year. I continue with Dell EMC because when there's an issue, they back it up and they make it right.

It's one of the easiest things to configure. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

Initially, because in the first system that we had seven years ago the drive space was so small—I think they were 4 TB drives—there were a lot of shelves. We had over a petabyte of storage, so it was a lot of shelves. The installation, physically, was what took a really long time.

Now, the drive size is much bigger and the density per shelf is much greater. The actual shelf count is a lot smaller, so the physical racking is a lot easier. When we switched over to the new A200 nodes, we went from four nodes to one, four shelves to one shelf, when we did the conversion.

With the initial install, it has to format all the drives and that can take some time. It was a long time ago so I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I believe it took us a day or two to format all the drives. But we had 12 shelves. After that we were fine. 

But when you add on, it just brings them up and formats them into the array, relatively quickly. But the initial one, depending on how many singles you have, can take hours, and up into a day, to format everything.

The second installation that we did was a lot quicker. We stood it up, had those initial problems adding the nodes, but then we had to move it because we had to move data centers. When we moved it, it took less than half a day. We actually had to shut it down to move it out of a data center into another data center. We carried it over to the new data center, rack mounted it, fired the thing up, and it just took off like it hadn't even been moved. It handled a good "power-down" situation with no issues.

It was done with two guys from Dell EMC and one of my system engineers. The network guy did some backend configurations. The two guys from Dell EMC came because they were physically mounting all that stuff. When we added the second one they sent two guys, but one guy pretty much just sat around and did nothing while the other did the hands-on-the-keyboard stuff. I had a system guy down there to help with how we wanted it configured. But it's relatively simple.

Overall, the first deployment was phenomenal. Everything worked out great. The training, what they conveyed to us and walked us through, that was phenomenal. The second deployment, on the second array—same thing, when we were running with the older nodes.

Then when we did the transition where we swapped out to the A200 nodes. Once again, phenomenal, everything worked out great. When we got the A200 nodes for the second cluster and upgraded them, the installation of that went fine.

When we started adding shelves, that's when the technical support fell on its face because the individuals that were working with it were not well-versed enough. I guess they assumed—and it's how it should be—that when you add a node, it's just rack it and stack it and then turn it on. But it didn't go that easily. There was some low-level engineering trick that you needed to know about, and these particular individuals didn't know about it. They do now, because we had to escalate it. The escalation was a little frustrating because it took about two days to get to the right person. But that right person knew the answer in five minutes.

We did an analysis of using cloud storage and on-prem storage. We did a comparison of the total cost of ownership between the two. Every time we have done it, the cost of onsite storage using the PowerScale system is fractions of a penny, per gigabyte, compared to cloud storage. There are no access fees or access charges like you get with cloud storage. If you want to utilize cloud storage, there are retrieval costs sometimes. I know there are different levels of cloud storage where you can archive and then pull up, but it takes about a day to get them to pull that stuff out of archive, and then you can access it. But there's also those access charges. You don't get that with the PowerScale system.

We're at the A200 version, which is more for online archiving. It's storage-based, but they're called archive nodes. They're all SATA spinning disks. If you need a lot of storage at a cheap, economical price, and really high-speed, if you're not doing transactional stuff, they have these archive nodes. The PowerScale A200 is more like an online archival system where the nodes are there but you're actively addressing them. It stores them on spinning disk so you get tons of storage for a good price.

Networking can get a little confusing. The big thing is to make sure you carve out your VLANs to this particular system. Put a lot of thought into the network aspect of it. Don't just slap it into your server network. Carve out an isolated network for your storage subsystems and make sure they have high-speed paths back to wherever you're going to be accessing it from. Don't cheap out on that because this system scales out and scales up. If you start cheaping out on the network part of it, you're not going to be happy with your access to it. The biggest thing is to configure the networking right and give it the unabridged paths that it needs to realize the low-latency, scale-out aspect of the system itself. You can jam yourself up if you neglect the networking aspect of it.

The A2000 system they have now, which we didn't even look into, is more of a non-active archival type system. They also have these hybrid systems where you would have staging areas where you could store on spinning disks and tier. Your storage becomes a tiered storage infrastructure where you have spinning and flash storage. You can put your high access, low latency stuff on your flash storage, and your archival, higher latency stuff, on the spinning disks of the hybrid nodes. We were looking at that, but we're not using this particular system as a low latency, production-type system. 

They also have the all-flash arrays, which is where you're getting massive amounts of throughput but it's just expensive, obviously, because it's flash. It's a lot more money. We weren't looking into that because we did not need speed. We were just looking for storage options. We have a different Dell EMC product that we use for our day-to-day, low latency, server-based storage. That's where our block storage is. Our file storage is what we use the PowerScale for. We didn't want to go to the all-flash array nodes. They're not cheap and we already had a solution in place for that.

Overall, the hardware itself, and the OneFs file system, are the best selling points, combined with the delivery and the installation. That's why I continue to buy Dell EMC.

We are using Dell EMC PowerScale as a central storage for our virtual HPC infrastructure based on VMware.

We have several silos today, as our HPC infrastructure is typically divided between bare-metal and virtual configurations. The storage that we use on various infrastructures is different, as we are typically using a storage style that is different from any production facility. Until now the request from our internal users was to keep the data separated in different storage silos, and converging in central storage facility while on the virtual HPC is the new request. Therefore, we are experimenting how it works.

We have five nodes of F200s. 

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. Our administrators and people are very happy with the platform.

Now, our storage I/O performance is three times what we had before, even if we had not optimized the networking that is hosting the infrastructure. For this reason, our internal users are very happy.

We know how to deal with the OneFS system very well. 

It is easy to use and scale. It is probably the easiest, most scalable storage that we have ever used with our infrastructure. It improves the performance of our infrastructure. We have some other types of storage, but they are not as simple to use like PowerScale.

The ease of use and installation have cut the time of putting a new storage solution into production. This has been very useful for us.

Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us. I think that will be available next year.

We have been using it for less than a year. We just bought the platform in May, then we did a couple of months of testing. Now, it is in production. We bought the solution as soon as it was announced, but you have to take into account the time of the delivery and testing. With the pandemic, everything is unfortunately slower.

The stability of PowerScale is incredible. It's not so different from Isilon. PowerScale is a sort of Isilon on steroids. It has the same scalability and reliability of the Isilon platform, but now you have a lot of performance, so it is a sort of super Isilon from a customer usage point of view.

In the year that we have had it in production, the solution has demonstrated stability and performance. It is something that we rely on for our simulation infrastructure.

There is a team of three who maintain all the infrastructure for PoweScale. It is easy to manage as soon as you have it setup.

It scales seamlessly. We started three nodes, then we added two and there were no problems. The impressive part: Now creating or expanding a PowerScale cluster is almost immediate. In the past, you needed more time. 

As of today, we have around 15 research groups doing work on the platform, but we have only started the production phase after weeks of testing.

The technical support is perfect. We are more than satisfied. They are responsive with good turnaround times.

We have several Dell EMC solutions. We are familiar with their support and are more than happy with it.

For NFS and CIFS services, we used Isilon and now PowerScale. We have lengthy Isilon experience in our data center. Today, we have still a Dell EMC Isilon H600 hybrid in production, but we decide to go to PowerScale to host our simulation facility. Typically, the workloads in which we are hosting on our virtual HPC environment come from engineering and chemical simulations as well as the latest AI and deep learning workloads.

We were beta testers from the first platform of Isilon before it was acquired by Dell EMC. Its scalability, ease of use, and performance were key. When PowerScale came out, we didn't try to buy another platform for this kind of work.

We have been very satisfied with our Isilon experience as a centralized system for HPC. PowerScale is much better than the Isilon that we had before.

The platform is really straightforward to install and use, so we are not losing too much time setting up the storage as is and have more time to deal with the data on it.

The initial deployment took one day to set up. You do have to do some preparation for the setup, especially on the networking side. However, on the infrastructure, the platform is easy and straightforward to set up. The preparation was to prepare the networking, where you will be connecting the machines, such as, the typical networking configuration and VLANS, then you are ready to go.

It is immediate to add a new node and put that inside your configured cluster, e.g., when we installed the new PowerScale, the installation of the operating system was very quick. It was really unbelievable. We came from the first generation of Isilon where the installation of the operating system was not so fast. The F200 skyrockets onto the OneFS. Though, if we could afforded the F600, then that would be also faster. However, what we can afford is the F200, and we are happy now with that.

We have seen an improvement of performance without losing too much time when setting up the new platform.

We did the implementation ourselves with the help of the Dell EMC support team, who set up the system. One person, myself, took a half a day to set up the infrastructure and another day to install it, then putting the platform in production.

Our infrastructure is directly managed by us.

We have improved the performance and reliability of our HPC storage. We are very happy with it. Our systems are typically used for research. The added value is in the performance. Typically, it's not a problem saving money. It is more a problem of how much research you are able to do, how many jobs you're able to afford, and so on. In this sense, PowerScale, in our infrastructure, is really a winning piece. Today, we have three times the performance on the I/O. The gain that we have with the I/O is significant.

Isilon was an incredible return on investment. I think PowerScale will be the same because it's giving us the performance that we were looking for at an affordable price. 

The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features. 

We went for the traditional NFS and CIFS platform. We have also licensed the HDFS platform because we want to do something with the HDFS.

There are some new features, but we are not using all the features because you need licensing for all them. However, we are seeing that the platform is growing. At the end of the day, when we will need some more features, we will license some more of those features, knowing that they will have them.

The F600 machine of PowerScale is much better than what we have. It has MDM drives and 100 GB connection with the same software.

I know that you can license also some enterprise class features on the platform, but we are not using those features today.

I have a small team who analyzed the market, but it is difficult to find some competition for PowerScale with the same performance and price. Something that was important during our decision was you have to teach a technician the new platform, and maybe that takes time. In this case, the integration of the PowerScale was almost seamless for the infrastructure and internal technicians.

Apart from Isilon, we are using DDN. We also have some parallel side systems that we are using production with our HPC. However, PowerScale is really the easiest to use.

I would recommend going for this solution.

PowerScale is already at the edge of the technology. If you give a look at what you find on the market today from the technology point of view, PowerScale hardware and software are at the top.

80 percent of our operations are brands, especially for HPC, but our organization is moving to the cloud from some services.

We have discussed with Dell EMC their roadmap of the platform and are very interested in it. We hope we will be able to afford the new features that will come up, like the NVMe nodes.

We have some projects using the S3 protocol, but not on PowerScale. They are on the old Isilon for HDFS.

We use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. We have two platforms on the CloudIQ: PowerScale and PowerStore. We haven't use the platform yet so much that it has been useful. We have typically been users of InsightIQ software to monitor infrastructure. Now, we are using the CloudIQ, but do not much experience.

We are not thinking about using it as an enterprise platform. However, we do see increasing our usage over time.

I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.