Dell PowerScale Reviews

Before we implemented Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we used an AIX configured as NFS, and that runs on IBM Power and has its own limitations because it shares resources with other LPARs. When our data becomes large, we need to scale out enterprise storage systems like Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Since our organization is a governmental organization, and direct purchase is not allowed, we prepared an RFP, and the vendors participated with the formal bidding process. Different bidders and vendors participated in the bid, and Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled our requirement with the most cost-effectiveness. We selected Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and use it for file storage. The main purpose we use it for is large files in our environment, and it supports multiple protocols like NFS, SMB, and S3 with a single storage plus.

We primarily use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as NFS and SMB. The features we appreciate from it are the SyncIQ feature that supports replication from two site states for disaster recovery purposes. This is beneficial for our disaster recovery plan and for business continuity. SyncIQ is a great feature that we use actively.

Additionally, NFS, SMB, and S3 are good features that we primarily use. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) deployment is user-friendly with a good graphical user interface. It is easy to use and provision the storage for different application purposes.

I have experienced a RAM failure in some of the nodes of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), and that required hardware replacement. For large file replication from site to site, it takes a long time. This leads to issues when we plan a switchover from site to site, as the replication is not finished within minimal time. It takes a long time and leads to some downtime until the file is fully synchronized. For a large amount of files, the site-to-site replication takes considerable time, leading to some downtime during planned switching over.

Otherwise, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is good. It is scalable, reliable, and it supports node cluster architecture. Overall, it is a solid solution.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) since 2021.

Regarding stability, I find no lagging, crashing, or downtime with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). It is a highly scalable, stable, and reliable solution that I have experienced.

I have contacted technical support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) through Zoom sessions and email conversations. There is also a person in our country who supports the Dell solution, and they actively assist us with any issues we raise. The quality and speed of support for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are good. From my experience, I have confidence in the support. When we face issues, we raise a ticket through the valid portal, and they respond immediately and assign a local engineer to coordinate the support process.

Before Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we used AIX as NFS. We configured the AIX server as NFS. We did not have enterprise scale storage like Dell PowerScale (Isilon) before; this is the first one we have used.

When I compare Dell PowerScale (Isilon) with AIX configured as NFS storage, there is a significant difference. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) supports multiple protocols with a single solution, including NFS, SMB, S3, FTP, and HTTP. It is beneficial to support different applications. Additionally, it has a cluster node architecture, which is beneficial for performance and to get more capacity. It is easy to maintain. When we run on AIX, it leads to long downtime when we plan a maintenance task on AIX servers. AIX shares resources with other LPARs, leading to performance issues. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a better solution in comparison.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) requires maintenance on our end, but the maintenance tasks cannot be performed by our organization's team; they must be executed by experienced Dell personnel. We experienced a RAM issue that was replaced during planned maintenance time. Additionally, we perform planned firmware upgrades regarding the software and hardware. The RAM issue was the problem related to Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

For the initial deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), it cannot be done by one person alone. In our organization, we built a team for the deployment, and from Dell, they also assigned an experienced person to deploy the solution. From our organization's side, there was a prepared team for the deployment, and from the vendor side, experienced personnel were assigned to deploy the solution. It was deployed effectively.

As I mentioned before, we did not purchase Dell PowerScale (Isilon) directly. Since our organization is a government entity, the country policy does not allow direct purchases; it goes through a formal RFP process. We prepared an RFP, and the bidders and vendors participated in the bidding process. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) fulfilled the requirement and was the most cost-effective option. This is how we made our selection.

For the support of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I would rate it nine out of ten.

For the overall solution of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I rate it eight out of ten because the SyncIQ replication feature takes a long time for large files, which leads to downtime during planned site switching. Additionally, we have experienced a RAM issue, which is why I rate it this way.

In terms of scalability, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is quite good. I have scaled Dell PowerScale (Isilon) once, and we also have plans to scale it again. It is beneficial for adding capacity and performance. If one node fails, the system continues to work with other nodes, avoiding interruptions and supporting business continuity. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a good scalable solution.

We immediately saw the benefits of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because our files are large. During the deployment of this solution, we did not wait to test the solution; we immediately started migrating the files to the solution. My overall review rating for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is eight out of ten.

One of our use cases for Dell PowerScale is to have a storage system for us. We are basically using it for hosting our NAS and as shared storage. We also have a couple of servers for our AI factory, which is still in POC with the NVIDIA GPU. Compute is our primary focus at the moment.

We are not using Dell PowerScale for data management at the moment; perhaps in the future, we might use it as a warehouse or for some other use, but currently it is just a NAS that we are using to store our databases locally, and those databases are not that operation-intensive.

Dell PowerScale does play a role in our organization's AI initiatives. It is still in POC, but it does contribute to our efforts.

We chose Dell PowerScale because we already had Dell management, so we know the hardware is solid and it comes with NVMe SSDs. The IOPS is there, and we were looking for use cases to build our own in-house generative AI. The contenders were either using Cisco UCSX or going with Dell PowerScale. Since our whole environment was already Dell PowerScale, we went with Dell. Additionally, there is also integration with OEM, which makes our lives much easier and we can have a single point of focus.

The integration of Dell PowerScale with our existing IT infrastructure is pretty efficient for operational efficiency. We have been using it for a little while now, and what we have seen is that the NAS performance is quite good, and the ones we are using for data integration and AI factory are working very well as well. OEM integration is there, which makes our lives much easier.

The previous versions do not support features like object storage; S3 and better cloud connectivity are things I would like to see. A policy-based management system would also be much better.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale for more than two years now.

Till now we have not seen any issues with the overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale. We are running somewhere around 500 TBs on each server, and we have not faced any issues with IOPS or network connectivity.

In terms of performance and reliability, we have not had much experience with complex data sets; we are still using it for basic NAS purposes. Whatever we have done so far, we have not seen any issues. We have not had any hardware failure yet, so we do not know what kind of redundancy or failures to expect in the future. At the moment, it is quite stable, as are the other servers from Dell.

Dell PowerScale seems scalable as it uses OneFS. While I am not entirely sure what kind of enterprise data protection and compatibility it will have in the future, it seems scalable for us at the moment.

Regarding the technical support and customer service teams, from what we have seen, Dell tech support is quite good and on point; we do not have any complaints. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Dell tech support as a nine or ten; the support is there for us anytime we need it.

For our AI practices, we did not use a different product prior to adopting Dell; it is a really new initiative for our team and our product. We were using PowerEdge and also using EMC, though.

The initial setup process of Dell PowerScale is quite straightforward; everyone has worked on Dell before. The UI was familiar even though a couple of changes were made, but it was not that difficult for us.

We did the deployment in-house.

We have not had trouble managing aspects like AI-driven data insights and automation with Dell PowerScale; since it supports RDMA and RoCE version two, that is one of the great things we have. Additionally, NVIDIA GPUs are integrated with that, and I would have to go more in-depth since we are using a couple of custom software solutions, and that can be a violation for me.

I do not know what the purchase price was as I am not included in the budgeting discussions. From what I know about the physical racking, stacking, and everything, it seems to be quite efficient at the moment. However, we acquired it a couple of years ago, and we just recently started, so I am not sure what the current price point is in the global market.

The contenders were either using Cisco UCSX or going with Dell PowerScale. Since our whole environment was already Dell PowerScale, we went with Dell.

We work with Dell EMC and then we have Dell PowerEdge. We do work with Dell PowerScale.

We have not had cloud-based operations; however, we have done it with Dell PowerEdge. From my experience with Dell, it works fine. We are using a couple of servers with an open-source OS for our edge routers, and it just works fine. We are terminating a lot of cloud infrastructure on those, and it is able to handle traffic quite well; the only issue I might have seen is sometimes the IOPS drops, but that is again a firmware issue we had. Other than that, we have not seen any specific issues related to the cloud.

One of the reasons we chose Dell PowerScale was its capacity; if I remember correctly, the row capacity for it is somewhere around one petabyte. That was one of our key points. It also stores NVMe, has in-transit and at-rest encryption, and can be clustered up to a couple of hundred devices. We currently have a few devices coupled up, not in physically clustered, but virtually clustered, and we are not having any issues. The physical efficiency is also there, so all of that you are basically getting in one rack unit, which is not a huge physical footprint for us.

I am an administrator on a star team managing everything; we are the ones responsible for it. From physical management to software management, the underlying OS management, everything falls on us.

One of the performance metrics we use to measure success with Dell PowerScale is IOPS. Network connectivity is again important, and we also measure on our observability platform what kind of power consumption it is doing, what the expected power consumption is, and how well it is communicating with our other virtual clusters. These are the basic benchmarks at the moment, but I think that will change in the near future.

From a security point of view, we are using hardware security at the moment; we have TPM and Intel Secure Boot enabled, and our NVMe drives are encrypted. That is all we are doing for security at the moment.

We have not used Dell PowerScale much yet, so I cannot give feedback until we push it to the edge and see what goes haywire. The OS seems quite stable, and the integration goes quite well; we are not using it for intensive workloads at the moment, so it is hard for me to say what results it will bear under pressure.

I would recommend Dell PowerScale. However, it depends on what every customer is looking for and what kind of usage they have from use case to use case. If it is similar to ours, then that is the recommendation.

I have been working in my current field for almost seven and a half years now. Overall, I would rate Dell PowerScale as a 7.5 or 8 on a scale of one to ten.

My role in using or managing Dell PowerScale is that I'm a director, so I manage a team of systems engineers and architects that administer and support these platforms.

I have been using Dell PowerScale since we migrated from the Isilon platform this year, and during that initial migration, we noticed a noticeable increase in performance from switching over to PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale aligns with my organization's strategic goals of improving operational efficiency through platform modernization, since having Isilon before that was not all-flash. Moving to Dell PowerScale all-flash results in a noticeable jump in performance, with outreach from people on the engineering side noticing the speed in which they could open CAD/CAM workloads on Dell PowerScale, much faster than Isilon. The fact that the business saw a noticeable improvement in performance the day we switched over was a game-changer, not to mention the ability to seamlessly swap out the nodes to move from the older Isilon platform to Dell PowerScale, with no data migration, making everything seamless, done behind the scenes, and users only noticing the jump in performance.

We are extremely happy with the performance and the features that we have been given regarding Dell PowerScale, so I could not think of anything else right now, other than making it cheaper.

The pricing, licensing, and setup costs are interesting for us as we utilize Dell Flex on Demand, paying for it with a consumption-based OpEx model. There is an initial upfront commitment, and as we grow, that ability to scale out as our growth scales, while not paying anything more than what we are using, holds great value for us.

The comment about pricing improvement was more of humor, as we bought it on capital. With the consumption model, we pay a certain price per gigabyte, and as we grow and scale, that price gets lower the more we grow, so seeing that drop a bit more to be more competitive might help, but from a market perspective, Dell PowerScale was the leader from a cost standpoint when we did the pricing.

I have been using Dell PowerScale since we migrated from the Isilon platform this year, and during that initial migration, we noticed a noticeable increase in performance from switching over to PowerScale.

The stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale have been rock-solid for us. Even with Isilon, I do not think we ever had something as much as a failed drive or a bad cable, so I am expecting that same kind of consistency and performance level with Dell PowerScale.

There has been no downtime whatsoever, not even during the migration.

Dell PowerScale absolutely grows with the needs of my organization.

The Flex on Demand growth model allows us to scale up and scale out as we need to for data migrations. That seamless back-end process with no disruption was huge for us, unlike when we migrated from our older platform to Isilon the first time, which required a third-party software tool for data migration that was noisy and disruptive. This time, it was all done seamlessly just by swapping out the hardware.

Since I have not used customer service and technical support, I do not need to rate them. Dell PowerScale has been rock-solid for us from a performance perspective. We have not had to need support, which is a good thing, but we know if we ever do need them, we have a TAM on our account and, from support engagement we have done for other products in the past, there are no concerns from that perspective.

Before Isilon, we had a traditional Windows file system that ran on top of the Unity storage platform.

We switched because Unity was a hybrid flash array, whereas Dell PowerScale is now all-flash, so from a performance and a modernization perspective, it made sense for us to do so.

I think we have seen return on investment with Dell PowerScale, just in the speed in which we can access the files and the engineering capabilities. We are also seeing where engineering uses it as a landing zone to run workloads, which in the past we never really allowed them to explore doing.

We have identified other opportunities just outside of that traditional file share workload where we are permitting engineering to use it as a landing zone to run VMware workloads.

Data governance is certainly a big emerging challenge for us as managing enterprise data. It is not just going to be dependent on our strategy for file shares but also involves our landscape with SharePoint sites and so forth. I think it is really more of a purpose-built solution, giving us that visibility in that space that we have never had before.

Dell PowerScale does not currently play a role in my organization's AI initiatives, as we are a very big Microsoft shop doing a lot in the Copilot space. However, being an aerospace and defense company, we have limitations on what we can use from a cloud perspective. I think the tagging part will help because as we better understand where our data is and what access we are going to allow these AI tools to have, it will pay dividends in the future.

I would rate Dell PowerScale a 10 overall.

Before this project happened, I sat with the customer and understood what they needed for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). They have a surveillance system, and since it's unstructured, this was the first thing we recommended to use. 

Since they needed to use this for archiving and had a long retention period, they wanted very good storage and high-capacity storage. That's why we recommended the A3000. 

I worked with them on the sizing part and getting customer requirements. For step one, I came with the team here, who have people who are purely technical that will do the implementation. 

I usually sit with them and the customer, understand, and check the flow of everything from A to Z. This is mainly my responsibility. From hands-on experience, since I spent my time mostly with technical engineers, I can do the same work as them if needed.

Any storage system has something called RAID, while Dell PowerScale (Isilon) uses the Reed-Solomon protocol. It's the same concept as RAID, however, it secures in case something happens on the node or the disks. In the Dell PowerScale (Isilon) system, this is calculated automatically. Instead of us assigning a RAID 5 or RAID 6, Dell automatically assigns, for example, for this project, they assigned something called 2d:1n, which means that in case of a failure of one node or two disks, the system will stay up and running. These are the protection features that I appreciate.

From the deduplication part as well, there are many features. I was recently in a meeting with some people from Dell here in Saudi, and they were talking about the new Dell PowerScale (Isilon) systems that are AI-enabled. I didn't do much research on them, however I can see where Dell's direction is going with these features. 

From the automation part or from making life easier for humans, I appreciate the approach they're taking. Based on the feedback I received from Dell people who worked on the new Dell PowerScale (Isilon) system, they said things are becoming more automated and they are able to help the technical people or the pre-sales people deploy the system even better. They even enable the customer to get more insights about their data.

If something fails or there's a hardware issue, they can order parts online with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The customer when ordering the system can add ProSupport, depending on the time needed and how critical their use case is for the system. If the customer pays for ProSupport, maintenance is very good, with service within four hours or the next business day, depending on what they order.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) and supports scale out. You can add as many nodes and scale linearly. For the first purchase to create a cluster, you must buy four nodes. Moving forward, they can buy a pair of nodes at a time. It's very easy to scale out - just initialize the node and join it to the existing cluster.

With every iteration of the OneFS system, new features are being added, and the UI is being updated here and there. So far, the system is adequate as a whole. Perhaps if there was a local chatbot built within the system or on the dashboard where we could directly ask for anything on the OneFS, it could help us. I remember seeing it somewhere. I don't recall if it's on the Dell system or not.

I have been in this industry for around a year and a half. In terms of using Dell PowerScale (Isilon), I can say I've used it approximately one year.

I don't recall any time we did an installation or deployment of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) where a customer contacted us telling us the system wasn't working. Everything has been working properly.

We mainly get hardware issues, such as hard disk failures. We occasionally see PSU defaults, not chassis failures. Since we have good protection levels, the data is secured and replicated across the disks.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) definitely deserves ten out of ten for scalability.

The level of service depends on the type of support with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). If discussing support through partners, I would give it an eight out of ten, however, support online is definitely a ten out of ten. When Dell people are involved directly, it's very good. That said, sometimes when they assign the task to a partner to deliver, it depends on the partner they are delivering the task to and the personnel they're sending.

We started yesterday with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and we're almost done today. It's a small deployment with just one chassis that has four nodes, so it was quite easy. The more hardware you have, the more time you need. Initializing the cluster took us about four hours.

We are a small team with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), around five or six people, depending on the project.

It's considered between mid and high-end regarding. Dell usually knows how to position each model. If the customer wants something inexpensive, there's PowerVault. The system is marketed for mid-range to high-end pricing.

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

Dell PowerScale serves as our primary storage for our PACS imaging, storing all of the radiology images across our entire business. Because of this critical function, it is extremely important that it remains up and running at all times.

The features of Dell PowerScale that I appreciate most include the ease of redundancy over networks, as we have one cluster in one location and another cluster in a disparate location. If one fails over, it is fairly easy to fail over to the secondary cluster.

Dell PowerScale aligns with our organization's strategic goals of improving operational efficiency because it has always been targeted at unstructured data, which we use for our PACS imaging. It has always been well-aligned for what we needed, and we have been using it for quite some time, finding it very effective for our imaging.

Dell PowerScale aligns with our organization's goals of supporting digital transformation initiatives, as we started with PowerScale nodes that only had spinning drives and have since moved to SSDs. Those SSDs have been faster, which improved our performance with our PACS systems.

Dell PowerScale is a very solid product right now, and I do not see any immediate improvements that it needs, but possibly some UI tweaking here and there and unification of settings would be beneficial. However, it still performs very well. I think it does need some easier user-facing management.

An example of something that is problematic at the moment or that I would want to see improved is that there needs to be further delineation between access zones and settings. Things are not always clear as to what I am managing or what section of Dell PowerScale that I am actually managing. Additionally, the networking portion can be a little confusing in terms of access zones and what features I am actually editing or modifying. On top of that, the isi commands can get confusing at times; some only work on individual nodes while some are cluster-wide. There needs to be a little more clarification and more end-user ease of doing certain configuration tasks.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale as top-notch, as the only issues we have ever had are just failed drives, which is to be expected. We receive new drives proactively, and they are sent to us and are very easy to replace. Drive failure has been less prominent now that everything is solid-state, and it really is very reliable. We have never had a node motherboard fail or anything bigger than a drive, so it has all been very smooth.

Dell PowerScale scales with the growing needs of our organization very simply, as all you do is attach nodes to your network, usually your top-of-rack switch, and you join it from the command line. It is a very simple process with only a few steps, and after that, I can get granular in my configuration for the nodes I have deployed. Initially deploying is very simple. Dell support is always there if I have questions after deployment.

I evaluate the customer service and technical support for Dell PowerScale as very good, since it was actually the first enterprise application support that I have dealt with, and I have never had any problems. They have always gotten back to me within a couple of hours usually, and if there are higher priority cases, we have gone to our account supervisors, and they have been great. The general support is excellent; I never really had any problems with it. We use them for upgrades and general support, and both have been great. I would rate Dell PowerScale customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, as I have never had that many problems with support.

Prior to adopting Dell PowerScale, we were using another solution to address similar needs, but I am not sure what the solution was. What we were using previously was slower. I think we have been using Dell PowerScale for approximately twenty years now, when it was previously Isilon. When we did adopt Isilon/PowerScale, we saw a major improvement.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is to deploy Dell PowerScale and how long it takes to deploy, I am Isilon certified, which was previously PowerScale certified. I have done several virtual deployments and also physical, real deployments within our organization, and it is very easy to do. There are a couple of join commands that you do once the nodes are networked up, and it literally just adds the nodes to your cluster. There is no hassle; you configure them a little bit afterwards, but really, it just pushes those new nodes right into your cluster. The process is very simple.

I have seen return on investment with Dell PowerScale, as any amount of time that can be saved for our radiologists is ROI for us. The fact that Dell PowerScale is fast enough to support their needs means that we do not hear complaints, and second of all, images get read faster and patients get better quality of care.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing is minimal. I have set up a few nodes in my time, but it has always been very easy. I do not have the actual pricing or anything, as I have not deployed nodes and been involved in the pricing structure.

Dell PowerScale does not play a role in our organization's AI initiatives right now.

My advice to organizations considering Dell PowerScale is that if you are an organization that uses unstructured data, it is a beautiful way to go. Definitely consider it as one of your top choices. I would rate this review a nine on a scale of one to ten.

Our primary use cases include virtualization storage and external storage via NFS.

I find that the features of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are not extensive. Our customer chooses Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because of the pricing issue, not the functionality. They discovered that the reseller in Taiwan has a per gigabyte price that is more expensive than Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The maintenance is good, but the subscription fee is higher than other storage solutions.

The maintenance is very good, and the deployment is straightforward as well. Pure Storage is still our first choice if we want a very fast deployment or engagement.

In our customer's company that is a campus, around 5,000 people use Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Among corporate enterprise customers, they do not use larger options like the big FlashArray; they are only using smaller solutions like FlashStack, which may accommodate around 100 to 200 employees in each enterprise customer.

I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve some functions such as Apache S3 or containerized storage support, as these aspects are not well-developed. Their support system is weak; many issues require us to conduct our own research and apply solutions to the equipment, so using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) demands more maintenance effort from us.

Not much noticeable improvement or impact from Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is observed in our customer's business operations. We still discuss with our customer that Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not the best or most suitable choice. Our customer is always focused on three things: they want to minimize maintenance effort, they question pricing if functionality is not different, and they consider our professional services. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) requires us to spend more man-hours on maintenance compared to Pure Storage.

In terms of what Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could learn from Pure, I would say they lack certain features such as upscaling; they do not have an Evergreen program as Pure has, and their support system is weak. Firmware or software updates become effortless with Pure, but with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), we must evaluate or conduct trial runs to ensure that these operations will not harm our customer's system; their software is not adequate.

Currently, the AI capabilities of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) pertain more to lake services. However, our customer does not have this big data storage; their dataset is average, around 100 gigabits or 100 gigabytes. With 100 gigabytes, the performance will be comparable between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Pure, especially within FlashArray, as the dataset is not enough to push the machine's limits.

We always use random write and read metrics with 4K files, and possibly also 1K files. This is a script we have coded via some cloud solutions. Currently, our customer does not face throughput issues because the network infrastructure does not keep pace; the bottleneck is consistently the latency of the switch.

Beyond containerized storage support and software updating, I have had very bad experiences with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because they present more issues than other storage options, even when compared with NetApp. They lack sufficient support, and their software is not user-friendly. If I were to suggest any improvements, it would be to enhance their software. I would rate this review overall as a seven out of ten.

Dell PowerScale is suitable for NAS, CCTV, and unstructured data, primarily as a scale-out NAS system designed to manage petabytes of data in a single namespace.
In handling enterprise data, data is crucial, akin to the new oil. Unstructured data is continuously generated, requiring a suitable platform for management that offers scalability, data protection, privacy, and multi-tenancy. Dell PowerScale provides these features, enabling enterprise customers to use a unified platform for collecting data from various sources. This platform can serve as a home directory, support CCTV, and accommodate different use cases like Hadoop object-based storage, all managed through one dashboard, cluster, and with a unified management perspective.

The main advantages of Dell PowerScale are its scalability and ease of scaling, as it can handle petabytes of data in a single namespace, and its simplicity to manage. Unlike other products, which may require multiple file servers, Dell PowerScale allows petabytes of data in a single namespace, managed by just one person. This is particularly beneficial for large-scale data, such as airport CCTV recordings, which can reach many petabytes.
Performance is another key feature, with various tiers based on data requirements, including NVMe, flash nodes, hybrid, and nodes for deep archive. Dell PowerScale also offers strong data protection, allowing for the loss of at least one drive or node without disrupting operations.
Operational efficiency and ease of use with Dell PowerScale are notable, as managing the entire cluster is straightforward compared to other NAS infrastructures. The single namespace simplifies user experience.
Dell PowerScale supports multiple protocols, enabling it to function as a data lake. It can host various data types on the same platform, with data accessible via CIFS, NFS, or S3. It supports CIFS, NFS, SMB, S3 for object-based data, Hadoop, HDFS, parallel file systems, and ITBR superpod for Nvidia GPUs, which are part of AI storage.
Dell PowerScale integrates with AIOps for analytics, supporting AI workloads by connecting directly to GPUs for high performance.

One of the areas for improvement could be a more proper direct integration with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect Data Domain. This would enhance cyber resiliency features such as anomaly detection. Having a backup solution similar to what is available with PowerStore and Data Domain for enterprise customers would be beneficial.

The existing integration is there, but the only negative point I see about Dell PowerScale is mainly the pricing perspective because it is not intended for SMBs, but for enterprise customers. Dell PowerScale cannot be compared with Synology solutions. It is an enterprise solution, which means its pricing and features are geared towards enterprise usage. A starter kit for small and medium businesses would be good.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale, formerly known as Isilon, for eight years.

Dell PowerScale is very stable and scalable because it has a very nice data protection strategy, and it can scale petabytes on a single namespace.

The technical support from Dell is good regarding Dell PowerScale, although I believe it could sometimes be better. I would rate the support at nine out of ten.

In terms of price, it is quite pricey, but regarding return on investment, customers can observe ROI with Dell PowerScale because it can be used for multiple use cases. If customers have this platform in their data center, they will find that a lot of data can be consolidated under a single platform, making it better than having different devices for backups or small NAS solutions.

I am working with Dell PowerScale today, which is also called Isilon.

Dell PowerScale is much more advanced compared to competitors, offering more flexibility with different types of drives and nodes, and in terms of simplicity in management.

The deployment procedure for Dell PowerScale is quite straightforward. If you are certified for deployment, you can manage it easily.

I do not have performance metrics or benchmarks to measure success with Dell PowerScale.

My review rating for Dell PowerScale is nine out of ten.

Dell PowerScale is my responsibility for handling the general information we have.

The biggest advantage of Dell PowerScale is stability. It is easy to manage because Dell and HP are famous products worldwide and here in Egypt. Regarding operational efficiency, Dell PowerScale is good and easy to use. When you have good support, you have a good experience, and it is easy to work with. You receive good support from the supplier or the company.

Sometimes my team needs to restart the machine or restart VMware, which takes a long time. Not every time can we do this. I mentioned before that the stability is good from Dell and HP.

We have been using Dell PowerScale for one year and a half.

Dell PowerScale is very stable and scalable. When you are working at one hundred percent capacity without issues, I trust the product, the software, and the infrastructure here.

Regarding technical support from Dell, it is very good. If I were to rate support on a scale from zero to ten points, where ten is the maximum, I would give it ninety to ninety-five percent.

The installation of Dell PowerScale is very easy.

Dell PowerScale saves us some time and money. We chose Dell for this because we have been using Dell for about twenty-five to thirty years.

I am currently using HCI products, specifically Nutanix and VMware. We use subscription-based HCI products and hardware solutions. We use hardware such as Dell machines, FortiGate firewall, and Juniper switches. Our servers are mostly Dell machines. We also use Kaspersky antivirus software and several other solutions. The router is from Egypt Telecom. We work with Dell PowerScale. I am not certain if our savings are ten percent, twenty percent, or more. Data management strategy is crucial, particularly regarding how multi-protocol support impacts our data management approach. We are partners with Amazon and AWS. We use Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. We have already established some success measures with Dell PowerScale, but I cannot provide the detailed results. Dell manages adaptation to new challenges very well, and we do not have any problems with support from Dell. Everything is very stable and functioning properly. The network team and I have met, and everything is working fine. I am not missing anything currently, and everything supported by Dell is good and easy to work with. We work in the healthcare sector, and AI is not something we can trust one hundred percent for patients, making it very difficult to use in the healthcare section at this time. The most beneficial security features include Forti and Kaspersky, and we previously used Sophos firewall and antivirus. Dell PowerScale is very stable and easy to use. Sometimes we have to restart the machine, but it is not heavy work, and it is easy to do when needed. My overall rating for this review is nine out of ten.

My use cases for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) include CCTV, video management, video server, and archival storage.

What I like about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are its best features, as it supports file and object storage, and it is very easy to manage.

The main benefit that Dell PowerScale (Isilon) brings to the table is that it gives the organization good file management.

I think Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is very good right now. Perhaps improvements could be made on the CPU level with a better CPU. I haven't used the NVIDIA yet, but a better Intel CPU would be beneficial.

The functionality that I would like to see enhanced in the future for Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is SmartPool for lifecycle management of data. I need more features, particularly for data migration and the ability to segregate data from old to new systems for lifecycle management.

I have been working with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for about 13 years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as having no crashes, but there have been performance issues. After someone performed a performance analysis and migration, I resolved the issues with SmartConnect, and the SmartConnect feature is effective as it resolves our performance issues.

I have escalated questions to the technical support and customer service team of Dell. The support center is very poor from Dell. Compared to when it was EMC before, Dell support is getting worse nowadays, with less support.

The response time is concerning. Even if you buy ProSupport Plus, they state within two hours, but after two hours, nobody contacts you. The response time shows there is no sense of urgency. Compared to EMC, the support in our region is not as good as it was before.

Neutral

Before adopting Dell PowerScale (Isilon), the company was using NetApp.

I decided to switch from NetApp to Dell PowerScale (Isilon) because of feature advantages like file system and data protection. It is easy to manage compared to NetApp, and I think the features are better than NetApp from a feature perspective.

I have knowledge about the deployment process of Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

My experience with deploying Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that the challenges are more related to working with the network team on their side. The OneFS itself is very straightforward and easy.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) serves as a storage node and compute node in this case.

Cost saving is one benefit. The organization finds it easy to manage resources, and it is easy to get to market. We can analyze the data, which makes it much easier to go to market.

I would advise other organizations considering Dell PowerScale (Isilon) that it is easy to manage, and it consolidates all traditional NAS instead of separating file systems and protection levels. NAS is easy, especially the OneFS operating system.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) may play major roles for small and medium-sized organizations.

My organization falls under small and medium-sized organizations in terms of size and revenue.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has features that specifically cater to the needs of small and medium organizations, as you can start with three nodes and then increase to 252 nodes, allowing you to start small and grow along the way.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as a product and solution a nine out of ten.

Our use case with Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that we do large data storage for that platform. That's probably the best way to explain what it does. For us, it's a big silo, so we can store a ton of data, and then basically retrieve it for our analytic platforms.

The benefit of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for our organization is the scalability. We started out with a pretty small system of a 32-node cluster, and then we built it out to 88 nodes. For us, that allowed us to go from being multi-petabyte to 10 petabytes plus petabytes on that one cluster.

We use Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for large-scale data. We deal with large data files, and our solution receives data that can be multi-terabytes in size. The flexibility of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has been good for us. Single files are limited to four terabytes in our configuration, however, the system can support up to 16 terabytes, so we can scale based on that too. 

I cannot think of anything to improve about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). The hardest challenge we have is due to how we've bought things over time. The way that we moved to the PowerEdge platform for the newer systems creates a scale problem as I still buy the older style systems, which are more dense storage. They're different chassis, so the problem we run into in the data center is the depth of the actual equipment. The newer equipment, if we buy an FX910 or a 900, it's a lot shorter in scale than if I buy an 83,000, which is much bigger. This makes it more complicated for deployment.

We've been using Dell PowerScale (Isilon) for about 11 years. It was called Isilon before it became PowerScale.

The overall stability and reliability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has been great. We haven't had any issues with it at all.

We have multiple Dell PowerScale (Isilon) solutions in our environment with multiple clusters. We use the SyncIQ function between the clusters. That way, if we have to move data off, we can allow it to share between the different clusters. We also run different versions of Dell PowerScale (Isilon). We don't always run the same OneFS on all our systems.

I rate Dell customer service a ten out of ten.

I have limited experience with customer service or tech support based on our environment. When we have warranties on our equipment, I reach out and file anything that needs to be done. In our facility, we have Dell onsite people. Dell comes into our facility with sales representatives and engineering staff who participate with us. We do engage deep support. Typically we don't have to most often. If I need a new hard drive, we file the claim through the Dell portal. The portal is really complicated to figure out features and functions, and it could be easier to navigate.

Before Dell PowerScale (Isilon), the company was using NetApp and other disparate systems. At some point, Dell came in, did a presentation, and once it started working, we replaced everything else.

In our environment, we are the showcase for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). When people are looking at Dell PowerScale (Isilon), the Dell vendors often point back to us and say, 'These guys have been running with this for 10 plus years.' We can talk about the scalability and everything, which helps with customer ease. In our environment, people are risk-averse, so it's complicated to get someone to change.

We've looked at VAST and Weka as solution spaces. We are also replacing our current NetApp with PowerStore. NetApp has become very difficult to deal with in our customer spaces. We recently had a drive failure, and when we went out to get a quote since it wasn't under service contract, they wanted $30,000 to replace a single hard drive. This helped our decision in moving to another product. Dell was well-positioned with the PowerStore for that replacement. It fits our ecosystem since having PowerStore, Dell PowerScale (Isilon), PowerFlex, and PowerVault all work together. We can attach the iDRACs back to the OB solution for a holistic view of the environment itself.

We continue to bring in more pieces. The success of Dell PowerScale (Isilon), PowerFlex, and all the other pieces helped us make a decision to move away from NetApp. NetApp was our original storage solution before we went to Dell PowerScale (Isilon).

I don't focus on return on investment. Peace of mind and customer satisfaction are our priorities. We've only had two failures over the past 10 years with the product. We run the system longer than most - on Dell PowerScale (Isilon), most of our nodes are up over six to 700 days before we power them down. We don't always fit the model of keeping up with patches, however, we don't have to in our disconnected environment.

We have to go through a certified reseller for Dell PowerScale (Isilon). From a value standpoint, it performs very well.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has been huge for the customer as they started out with a much smaller scale system. Based on the flexibility of the system itself, it was easy for us to manage the growth by buying individual nodes as needed. Once you have the base built, it's easy to scale. We went from about 3 petabytes starting out, and now we've grown to over 20 petabytes of storage on multiple arrays. As we're moving to the newer platform, it's even easier moving off the F800, 8200 platforms.

The iDRAC feature with PowerEdge is beneficial, and now that they have it in Dell PowerScale (Isilon), that's significant. PowerStore has it. It's based on the same platform.

I rate Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten out of ten, and we continue to keep buying it.