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."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 most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"Dell PowerScale's performance is good."
"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 most valuable feature we started using, beyond the initial scope for the solution, is the multi-protocol system that allows you to access the same set of files using different network protocols like NFS or SMB. PowerScale’s Unified Permission Model ensures that data security and access permissions are honoured regardless of whether the client is a Windows desktop or a Linux server"
"Dell PowerScale is a scalable solution. It allows non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance of the system."
"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 most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"A simple and stable solution for small businesses that use virtualization."
"The most important part is that you actually know you have a backup of the whole virtual server."
"We have evaluated other solutions but Veeam is the best for virtualization."
"Veeam Backup has many valuable features and every feature is different. I have created backups for file-level backup, VMware or hypervisor virtual machines, physical machines, and workstations as well. Every time, I learn something new."
"I have been in contact with technical support and they are very good."
"Veeam Backup Replication is stable I have not had any problems."
"From my experience, Veeam is very good. Its interface is user-friendly. We can restore it whenever. It's not complicated. It's very easy to manage and administration is very easy."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement."
"The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol. At the present, you cannot protect access to data via HTTP or HTTPS the same way that you can secure data access through other protocols like NFS or SMB[...]the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply."
"The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price."
"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."
"In terms of what can be improved, I would say they could add automations for disaster migrations and for reverse replication. Overall, they need more automation."
"Immutability could be improved."
"They need to improve their technical side."
"The initial setup of Veeam Backup Replication is straightforward. The process took approximately two days. The setup could be streamlined to take less time."
"They need a better solution for backend storage."
"The direct SAN backup integration can be perfected by improving the snapshot removal mechanism and process from the storage volumes."
"Cross-hypervisor replication can be improved."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 37 reviews while Veeam Backup & Replication is ranked 1st in Backup and Recovery with 328 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 Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Veeam Backup & Replication is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Azure Backup, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup and Zerto.
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.
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...