Dell PowerScale Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Data storage performance needs to be improved.

We've been using this solution for several years.

It's been very stable.

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

Positive

We previously used another Dell product, and we switched because it became outdated.

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

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

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

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

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

We 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 use this solution to manage large data sets. It makes it easy for us to consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform for easier manageability. This means we only need to manage a minimal number of clusters. 

The solution is very flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. It scales well with different performance node types. In terms of data protection, it replicates easily with the replication features of SyncIQ. 

We have multiple clusters across two data centers and have two main teams; our enterprise storage services team, and our HPC team who recently purchased a bunch of capacity from Iceland.

When it comes to PowerScale Cybersecurity and ransomware protection, we use a third-party solution called Superna. It is still important to us that PowerScale helps secure our data from cyber attacks. An attack can happen very quickly and be very damaging. Large data sets are difficult to protect, replicate and recover.  

Using this solution, provisioning is a lot easier because we have large capacity clusters and can easily provide storage space to users as needed. We realized the benefits of this solution shortly after deployment. The management of the solution is very easy. 

This solution has had a positive effect on our company's storage efficiency. We are able to add capacity as needed in order to scale.

The ease of use of this solution has been the most valuable aspect as well as the SyncIQ and snapshot features. 

It assists with eliminating storage silos because it provides SMB and NFS protocols. PowerScale has also helped free up our employee's time to focus on other business priorities. 

I'd like to see more Iceland products in the cloud so that we can port our data into different environments if needed. I would also like to see a virtual appliance or software-defined Iceland product.

Version upgrades and patches take a long time to complete. This could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for twelve years. 

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution from a file data perspective. Scalability can be more difficult because you need three nodes minimum to start a cluster. You need a lot of other hardware to provide that service. This solution is not scalable in the cloud.

 I would rate the support for this solution a seven out of ten. The quality of support depends on the agent you deal with. 

Neutral

We have used other solutions but Iceland is the storage platform of choice for the large data sets that we have. We have a very strong relationship with Dell and their support is very good so we were very comfortable choosing Iceland.

The initial setup is straightforward. Dell came in to install the solution and update the operating systems. After that, some administration and management tasks needed to be completed, and then the setup was complete. 

Pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

This solution scales very easily. You just need to be aware of how much you scale as this can complicate the management of the solution. Scaling requires a strategy. 

PowerScale is easy to manage but more difficult to maintain. This is because it is a multiple node environment and the larger you get, the longer it takes. There are more risks when you make a change.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives, as well as the access users get. But the end-user doesn't distinguish the difference between a file and its folder; the end-user doesn't have to see the difference.

The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed. There are no performance issues based on how large the storage is.

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

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

There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We looked at HPE and IBM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An important feature for us is scalability.

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

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

The management and monitoring tools comprise a disparate suite of products and the roadmap is very unclear. We've got four different products that look after the Isilon, management-wise, and it's a bit of a mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One storage engineer is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

We have seen a return on investment, although intangible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

• Research data
• Departmental file shares
• Data centre storage: NFS

We have two data centres in our university. We have Cisco UCS, Pure Storage, and are heavily virtualised with VMware. PowerScale is our unstructured data storage platform. It provides scaled-out storage and our high-level NFS across applications. It also provides all the storage for our researchers and business areas, as well as students, on the network.

With the exception of block workloads, which is primarily VMware, Oracle Databases, etc., everything else it is on PowerScale. It definitely has allowed us to consolidate the ease of management.

With the quotas having fewer large pools of storage in the data centres, we typically only have one or two Isilon clusters. That gives us the ability to multi-tenant or allocate data to different applications and isolate workloads. It is very efficient when managing that volume of storage. We are not tuning it every day or week. The only time that we are really doing anything with it is if we're planning an upgrade of some sort several times a year. Outside of that, it just does what we want it to do. 

We automate the vast majority of the things that we do on the Isilon clusters: provisioning of storage, allocation of storage, management of quotas wrapped into tens of thousands of students, and managing permissions. That's the level of support they have for their built-in API's, which is probably a huge game changer for us in the way that we manage the storage. It makes it far more efficient inside of PowerScale.

Compared to doing it manually, what we have been able to automate using the API is saving us at least tens of hours a month versus when we used to get service requests. We have even been able to delegate out to different areas. If we have an area with whom we do file shares, we delegate out the ability for them to create new shares and manage their permissions themselves. 

The solution allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. We see this in the big refresh that we did earlier in the year. After you have clicked the "Join" button and joined, you go to the old node and click remove, then wait for it to finish. You don't have to configure anything when you add new node types, they are automatically configured. You can tune them and override things if you want, but there is no configuration required.

PowerScale has enabled us to maximise the business value of our data and gain new insights from it. It gives us the ability to have our data stored and presented via whatever protocol is required. Now, we can look at all these different protocols without having to move or duplicate the data.

The solution allows you to focus on data management, rather than storage management, so you can get the most out of your data. We looked at the types of data that we have on the cluster, then we just target it based on the requirements. We don't have to worry about building up different capabilities, arrays, RAID types, etc. We just have the nodes, and through simple policy, can manage it as data rather than managing it as different RAID pools and capacity levels. If someone needs some data storage, then we ask what their requirements are and we just target based on that. Therefore, we manage it as a workload rather than a disk type. 

Their SmartQuotas feature is probably the thing that we use most heavily and consistently. Because it is a scaled-out NAS product, you end up with clusters of multiple petabytes. This allows you to have quotas for people and present smaller chunks of storage to different users and applications, managing oversubscription very easily.

We use the policy-based file placement, so we have multiple pools of storage. We use the cold space file placement to place, e.g., less-frequently accessed or replicated data onto archive nodes and more high-performance research data onto our high-performance nodes. It is very easy to use and very straightforward.

The node pools give us the ability to non-disruptively replace the whole cluster. With our most recent Gen6 upgrade, we moved from the Gen5 nodes to the Gen6 nodes. In January this year, we ended up doing a full replacement of every component in the system. That included storage nodes, switching, etc., which we were able to replace non-disruptively and without any outages to our end users or applications.

We use the InsightIQ product, which they are now deprecating and moving into CloudIQ. The InsightIQ product has been very good. You can break down the cost performance right down to protocol latency by workstation. When we infrequently do have issues, we use it to track down those issues. It also has a very good file system reporting.

For maximising storage utilisation, it is very good. As you add more nodes in a cluster, you typically get more effective utilisation. It is incredibly flexible in that you can select different protection levels for different files, not necessarily for file systems or blocks of storage, but actually on a per file basis. Occasionally, if we have some data that is not important, we might need to use a lower protection. For other data that is important, we can increase that. However, we have been very happy with the utilisation.

Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution’s OneFS operating system. In terms of group work, we have used it for about 13 years. The core feature set rollup has largely stayed the same over that time. It has been greatly improved over that time as well. So, it has always been that storage NFS sandbox, and they've broadened their scope for NFS v4, SMB3 Multi-channel, etc. They are always bringing up newer protocols, such as S3. Typically, those new features, such as S3, don't require new licensing. They are just included, which is nice.

Over the years, the improvements to existing protocols have been important to us. When we first started using it, they were running open source sandbox for their SMB implementation under the covers and they used a built-in NFS server in a free VSD. Whereas, with the new implementations that they introduced for OneFS 7 have had huge increases in performance and been very good, though there's not necessarily any new features. We even use HDFS on the Isilons as well at the moment. The continued improvement has been really beneficial.

It is incredibly easy to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. With CIFS and IBM Spectrum Scale, there just isn't the horizontal concern. I couldn't think of an easier way to deploy Petabyte NAS storage than using Dell EMC PowerScale.

The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement. 

There is a lack of object support, which they have only just rectified. 

About seven years.

The stability has been exceptional. I've been very happy with the stability of it. In the last six years, we have pretty much been disruption free. Prior to that, we have had one or two issues, which we worked with their support to fix. 

We had a major refresh at the start of the year when we replaced one petabyte at one site and a half a petabyte at another site. This completely replaced everything and took us about a month. It was finished with one staff member overseeing the process, moving the data and roping in one or two other staff at different times to help with the physical backing. 

They are quite heavy, so you always want to have two or three people involved. It has very minimal staff management required. For example, once the hardware is racked, it needs just one operator who joins the nodes, waiting for the data to move over. Internally, this is non-disruptive to the user. 

Firing up the old nodes, that is more of a management thing. 

Pretty much everyone touches the solution in some way or another. It has been a bit different right now with COVID-19, since a lot of people have been recently working remotely. In any given day, probably 12,000 people have been using it. That is just going by the number of active connections that we have from staff, students, and researchers at any time.

We can't see anyway that we would ever reach the limits of the product in terms of scalability and our workloads. We have no concerns around scalability. 

It has a back-end network that it's managing to get switches with enough ports to plug the nodes in, if you want to go big. That is the most complicated part, not the actual management of storage. As you add more nodes, that management overhead remains largely the same. 

For larger scalability, I would be very comfortable with it. We would just have to do some good site planning to ensure that we have enough room for it.

Our usage is pretty extensive. It touches on almost every area of our organization. With the introduction object and support for Red Hat OpenShift, which they're releasing in OneFS 9.0, we are very keen to explore and extend the usage in those areas. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading our test cluster on OneFS 9.0 to specifically evaluate use with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes in clouds. It definitely has a very strong place now in the data centre, and we don't see it going away anytime soon, as we see more workloads going onto it.

The support has been mixed. If you get through to the right engineers, you can get problems resolved incredibly quickly. If you don't, you can go around in circles for a long time. We do typically have to escalate support tickets through account managers to get them positioned correctly. However, once that happens, issues are resolved pretty quickly and we're generally happy. 

The technical support is average. There are certainly not the best that we have ever dealt with, but far from the worst ones. I would not recommend the product based on their tech support alone. 

Going back 13 years prior, we used to have a lot of Microsoft and Linux-based file servers all over the place. They were all siloed with a lot of wasted capacity. Consolidating all those down into a small handful of Isilon clusters has dramatically reduced the amount of silos that we have in the organization. In terms of reducing waste from having storage stuck in one silo or isolated area, it has made a huge improvement.

We have previously used IBM Spectrum, and I don't think you can buy anymore. Briefly, eight years ago, we moved a large portion of the workload off Isilon onto Spectrum. That was the biggest regret that I have had in my career. We couldn't get back on the Isilon fast enough. It was a commercial decision to move away from Isilon, which wasn't the cheapest. However, it was far more mature than the IBM product. Spectrum cost us so much that what we saved in capital expenditure we then lost in productivity, overhead, and maintenance. It was just a disaster. The support that we received from IBM was the worst support I have ever received. I've been in this industry and job for about 17 years now, and I have never had a worst support experience that I've had from IBM. It was a nightmare.

When we needed to get the issue with Spectrum fixed, there was no doubt about getting PowerScale. We couldn't get back on PowerScale fast enough. We just made that happen, and as soon as we did, all the fires were put out.

About 13 years ago, we were using six terabyte nodes back. Now, they're obviously a lot bigger than that. While scalability was definitely a key interest, the main driver for us was the ease of management to sort of consolidate all the separate file servers with their own operating systems and RAID arrays, and consolidating them into one pool of storage where we could allocate quotas and still manage capacity effectively, but centralize it and reduce waste. The ability to scale out was just icing on the cake, and definitely something we were very interested in. It's something we've utilised quite heavily over time, but the ease of management was the main driver.

The initial setup has always been straightforward. The process of creating a new cluster is largely the same now as it was 13 years ago. You get your first node, then connect the serial port to it. You answer about 10 questions, then you're ready to go. The rest of the nodes are added by clicking a button. It's incredibly easy to set up, and it says a lot that the process has been the same for about 13 years. There's not really much to improve or simplify, because it is already incredibly simple.

Assuming the hardware was racked, you could have the cluster setup and your minimum three nodes joined within half an hour to 45 minutes.

The process of adding a node is very straightforward: It is pressing a button. This can take five minutes, then the process is complete. Once you have added new nodes, you can then remove old nodes. 

Understand your workload. Make sure you size and cost it correctly for the amount of metadata you expect to see on it. Don't undersize your SSD.

For the whole replacement this year, I got one of our junior staff members, who had have never actually used our PowerScale, to do the whole upgrade process. I just pointed him in the right direction. Because it was very easy, he managed to do it without any issues.

We don't use any professional services. We always do it in-house. 

Two people are needed for racking hardware. Only one person is needed to deploy it, as that process is very straightforward.

The solution has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. Rather than managing all the different workloads on different storage arrays, Windows Servers, etc., we just have one place per data centre where we manage all their unstructured data, saving us time.

PowerScale has reduced the number of admins that we need. It has allowed our admins to focus on adding value through automating tasks and streamlining operations for our customers, rather than focusing on the day-to-day and tuning RAID profiles. We can use our APIs to automate workflows for customers and have quicker turnaround times.

The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management.

We added on a deduplication license. That is the only thing that we have added. That was a decision where it was cheaper for us to license the deduplication than it was to buy more storage, so we went with that approach. We just did an analysis and found this was the case.

We haven't really hit a workload or situation that we have had any issues catering for. Certainly with the huge number of different node types now, we could position any sort of performance from very cheap, deep archive through to high performance, random workloads. I feel like we could respond very quickly to any business requirement that came up assuming they had budget. Even if we didn't have budget, largely with the way our clusters are configured, we typically mix in high and low performance. We won't buy top of the line, high performance, but we will buy basic H500 nodes, which are a large amount of self-spinning disks. That is what we standardize for our high performance tier. 

13 years ago, it was called Isilon Systems. They were a start up in Seattle, while we are in Australia. We were importing the hardware directly. At that time, there was nothing really else that we were looking at. We were just caught up in revolutionising the way we would be managing one pool storage. Then, six to eight year ago, when we had that little stint on IBM Spectrum, we didn't go to market. We very heavily evaluated the IBM product and NetApp in cluster mode as an alternative. We did rule out NetApp from a management perspective as far too difficult to manage. The Spectrum product that we saw on paper and from our evaluation of loaned hardware seemed like it was going to be on par with Isilon. Little did we know the nightmare that would ensue from that. 

The biggest lesson that we learned was from moving away from it onto the IBM product. The maturity of a product is very directly correlated to the amount of time you spend managing it, as it is a very mature product. We have been using it for 13 years, and the core has a very solid, mature foundation that has been built over that time.

We have dealt with Nimble Storage in the past. I would recommend Nimble Storage based on their support (at that time), as they had exceptional support. However, Dell EMC support is no worse than Cisco or any of the other vendors that we have had to deal with, but it is nothing special.

Just don't underestimate how important a mature product is compared to something leading edge or new.

PowerScale's positioned primarily to receive the call within that data centre. We have PowerScale heavily centralized, both in our IT department and on our campuses. We don't really have any storage from PowerScale in the cloud or our edge because we have very good network connectivity. In terms of the right tiers of storage, the level of flexibility that we have for adding different types of storage with different characteristics to our existing cluster now is the best it's ever been in the 13 years that we've managed it. 

Between CloudIQ and DataIQ, they're replacing their legacy InsightIQ product. We haven't moved to CloudIQ yet to start looking at it.

Early on, since we have been using the solution for 13 years, if you added a new node type, then you would have to add three physical nodes to start a new pool and only end up with 66 percent utilisation on that storage pool. Whereas, in the Gen6 hardware, you can have more smaller nodes in one rackmount chassis. Now, you can add a new storage type and gain much better storage efficiency off the bat.

The S3 protocol specifically comes in OneFS 9.0. We have a test cluster for it, which we are in the process of upgrading to have a look at their S3 support. However, I haven't used it yet. Typically, we use something like MinIO, which is an open source object gateway, and put that in front of the PowerScale cluster.

On the archive side, we still have the A200 nodes. While you can go with the A2000s or go deeper than that, we can manage pretty much anything thrown our way by not going too extreme in our pools by positioning data effectively. I think it's very good.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10.