We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Veeam Backup & Replication based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."Isilon is flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. Dell continues to release updates and patches which enhance the use of this solution. This includes offering ransomware protection."
"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."
"The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features."
"This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use."
"Since it can scale so easily, as long as I have money to buy more nodes, I can grow it as big as I need to. That is important in our business. As sequencing technologies continue to evolve, and as those technologies evolve, the amount of data generation never gets smaller. It just always seems to get bigger. This is one of the absolute key aspects: We can grow on demand without having to forklift stuff."
"It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door."
"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 solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"With Replication, Veeam allows us to have a duplicated VM on standby."
"WAN Accelerator helps tremendously with replicating our data because we have a large chunk of data that gets replicated between our two facilities."
"Veeam is the gold standard for backup and recovery. The ease of use and reliability of this solution are real assets. Also, it has an ease of use to work with a third party vendor."
"The most valuable features of Veeam Backup Replication are ease of use, dashboards, and reporting."
"The features I find most valuable are probably the VMware snapshot backups and the Veeam replication. Their replication is very good. It can easily be used for disaster recovery in a number of situations."
"The encryption password is used to protect the backup files. Even if someone gains access to the backup job or files, they won't be able to utilize them without the password."
"It's got a very good user-friendly interface. It's easy to use."
"The data backup replication has been the most useful feature. Previously, we copied the data hub to an external hard drive but now we are able to store the backup on one of the depository service."
"The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology."
"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."
"Additional metadata reporting would be great. We have to use a separate tool to report on that. We would like to view the age of data and how long it has been since someone has accessed a file."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us and we'd love to have one."
"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a bit expensive compared to other products."
"The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path."
"Veeam Backup & Replication could improve by making it more user-friendly."
"The direct SAN backup integration can be perfected by improving the snapshot removal mechanism and process from the storage volumes."
"I have a problem with the VM. When we started doing a backup, it takes a snapshot for our virtual machines, but when we try it two or three times, in some cases, our virtual machines go to a consolidated state. I don't know why this problem happens. But I still think Veeam is a top-ranking solution."
"The whole graphical user interface is very easy, but the details are hidden deeply and aren't easily visible. You cannot easily see the details and explore or choose the settings. We should be able to easily explore various settings and options. If you can see more details while choosing the settings or setting it up, it helps in getting the software running easily. For example, in Microsoft Office, you can see much more in the interface than in Veeam Backup & Replication. It is a complex software. It is not easy to use, and you must know what to do and where to do. The user manual has more than a thousand pages. They should give some direct information through the software and improve the software. On their website, they can have some videos and step-by-step information to make us come straight to our goals."
"Its price is higher than other solutions and can be improved. They can also change the version of the software more often."
"The Veeam backup application interface is application-based and not web-based."
"The deduplication feature could be improved by changing to global deduplication."
"They need to improve their technical side."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 40 reviews while Veeam Backup & Replication is ranked 1st in Backup and Recovery with 329 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Veeam Backup & Replication is rated 8.6. 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 Veeam Backup & Replication writes "Beneficial pricing model, user friendly interface, and many free features". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Veeam Backup & Replication is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Azure Backup, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup and NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
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Assuming you want to keep the data within the datacenter, there are a few options:
For Small deployments (~20-100TB's), you could mount share(s) on any backup (media) server and backup the data up over the network using a file-system agent - Veeam could easily support this.
For Medium deployments (~100TB - 1PB), you could use any backup system that supports NDMP. Not sure if Veeam supports NDMP for Isilon, but there are a lot of other vendors that do.
For Large deployments (~1PB+), you may want to consider snap-replicate-snap - Kind of like the NetApp approach to data protection. Take Snapshots of the local Isilon, replicate to a remote (DR) Isilon, and take a snapshot of the DR Isilon. Some may argue that this is not a true backup methodology, but it scales well and you can set up many SyncIQ jobs with different RPO settings to support complex scenarios.
There are a number of alternative cloud solutions available e.g. Druva.
However, if the price is a key factor then you may benefit from by using an Managed Service Provider (MSP). MSP's white label large, credible & established platforms. They provide the same level of speed, uptime, resilience and security as a key brand name but can be as much as half the price. The management of the backup will be optionally yours or fully outsourced to the MSP.
Another benefit of the MSP model is that they will have other skills to complement your own internal resources potentially adding further layers of security and backend IT people to support your operation.
I have no experience with Dell EMC PowerScale though I do know that it is supported by Veeam.
A Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository can distribute the load across the PowerScale cluster via multiple Backup Repository Extents each defined to use a different cluster node DNS A record and path. When backups exceed the maximum file size limitation even with Veeam deduplication and compression, other considerations should be made.
Note: Disable the write coalescer on the share directory and all sub-directories used by Veeam. PowerScale is a complex system and therefore I would advise you to contact Veeam experts on how to deploy Veeam in accordance with PowerScale. But a Scale Out Back Repository is an option, also XFS with reflink supports any Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) configuration. MSP's are fine too if you are comfortable with having data outside your datacenter.
dsmISI VEEAM (general-storage.com)
It is possible to do it with most types of backup solutions, such as IBM Spectrum Protect.
But it requires a full scan to detect changed files.
The changed files will be the only part that will be sent to the IBM Spectrum Protect storage, using its progressive incremental forever (Always incremental backups).
It is also possible to use NDMP to protect Isilon storage, but that requires periodical full copies, and as Isilon can scale to multiple PB in size. It might not be efficient.
Regards,
Tomas
I did not have the opportunity to backup Isilon servers but, according to Veeam documentation, it is possible to backup NDMP servers data to tape. There are some limitations though: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/d...