We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and NetApp StorageGRID based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"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 tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."
"I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node."
"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 guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"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."
"The technical support is good."
"It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more."
"It improves our operational efficiency."
"Right now, we have an older StorageGRID. I like that we can grow it."
"It helps automate our storage infrastructure."
"It has enabled us to save money on storage costs. We removed our tape library."
"The speed of the disks removed the bottleneck from our storage."
"Duplication, interface and the manageability is good and simple."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) could improve the load distribution capability. For example, in some cases, the system load is not distributed automatically on all the nodes but is concentrated only on one. You have a peak request on only one node and the others don't do anything."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage."
"The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path."
"The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."
"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."
"We had some issues with level 1 support. We had to fight with them on repeated issues. There is room for improvement in level 1 support."
"Because of the magic that it does 'under the hood,' it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern."
"There was a small amount of confusion when working with StorageGRID and Active Directory for access. We had to do things three to four times resulting in our engineer troubleshooting a couple of things. The location of the menu, along with what is inside the menu: configurations, settings, etc., is not straightforward to users. Most users are Windows-based. So, when make logical changes to the menu which are not similar to Windows, users and administrators get confused."
"It has its quirks here and there, but it is an older NetApp system."
"Beyond the initial setup, this product is a little bit difficult to configure."
"The integration with more apps has room for improvement."
"The processes around installation and upgrade need improvement."
"The only real issue that we have run into is, when we are cloning, we cannot do a thin provision clone, it has to be a full clone."
"One key improvement I'd like to see in StorageGRID is enhanced visibility for management purposes."
"Improvements need to be made in the support area."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 2nd in File and Object Storage with 39 reviews while NetApp StorageGRID is ranked 7th in File and Object Storage with 12 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while NetApp StorageGRID is rated 8.4. 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 NetApp StorageGRID writes "Scalable object storage with robust data durability with efficient geo-distribution and comprehensive lifecycle management ensuring managing of large volumes of unstructured data". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas NetApp StorageGRID is most compared with MinIO, Dell ECS, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Scality RING and Nutanix Unified Storage. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. NetApp StorageGRID report.
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