We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Nasuni based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."
"The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features."
"For maximizing storage utilization, PowerScale is great. When you write the data to it, it spreads it out to all the nodes, so you get all the performance from the entire pool."
"The solution's scalability is very good."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"The solution is stable."
"Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center."
"There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great."
"The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud."
"I would recommend Nasuni because it's a proven product that has delivered results for us even in the worst-case scenario. If you're still using a traditional cloud solution like native Azure products, you are still susceptible to human error. Also, you would need to architect your backup and DR solutions, then integrate, maintain, and administer them."
"The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR."
"The nice thing about Nasuni storage is that it is immutable. This means the data is only written once. So, you never modify the files. When you write a file out to the storage, it doesn't modify it when you change it. The technology knows how to figure out what the difference is between the original file write and what the changes are. Therefore, it only saves the changes."
"I can see who is logging in on files from all over the globe. For example, if a file is locked, maybe a user in Shanghai has locked files or something, I can see that from the Management Console, then unlock the file."
"Snapshot backup is most valuable. It's quick and easy to use. It's controlled only by an administrator, which is very good. It takes 10 seconds to back up a spreadsheet of three or four megabytes."
"The snapshot functionality and the unified file system are definitely the most valuable features for us. The UFS allows everybody across the organization to see the exact same data at the same time, instead of having different file servers with different structures on them, and that's mission-critical. We have different branches throughout our organization that have to act on that data."
"One of Nasuni's best characteristics is its fully redundant system; we don't have to shift tapes or use other backup solutions. It's a good, full-featured product."
"The thing that they are working on now, and we are following closely is more native cloud integrations. The way that we envision workloads in the future is around moving compute to data instead of the other way around. So, we would like to have a single pane glass to manage storage across a variety of different platforms, including native cloud. That would be awesome."
"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes."
"We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience."
"I would like to see Nasuni create a Dropbox or Box alternative. One of the things that people like about those tools is that they are very easy to implement. They look just like a file server. With Nasuni, you have to be online to get your file storage. With Dropbox, there is a thing running on your PC that downloads the files to it when you need them, i.e., an agent."
"There are some issues with multiple users accessing the same file simultaneously. There would be times when the global file would lock when several people tried to access it, so that could be optimized more."
"I would like to see Nasuni provide the ability to mirror a Nasuni appliance from one site to another. They could maybe have a standby appliance that is mirrored in a different location for disaster recovery purposes. We can recover if data and a Filer are lost because of a possible ransomware event, but even that takes time to recover. If we had the ability to have a mirrored appliance, we could flip over to that mirrored device and resume instantly rather than repopulate the local appliance with data from the snapshot history in the cloud. This is another feature that we would really like to see, if possible."
"Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy."
"The only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com."
"The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 40 reviews while Nasuni is ranked 3rd in NAS with 35 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Nasuni is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) writes "We can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nasuni writes "We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and Huawei OceanStor 9000, whereas Nasuni is most compared with Panzura, WekaFS, CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, Qumulo and Azure NetApp Files. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Nasuni report.
See our list of best NAS vendors.
We monitor all NAS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
