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."Its scalability has been huge for us."
"Dell PowerScale's performance is good."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"PowerScale has made it extremely easy to scale file data across our organization. We have two implementations of Isilon. One is a replica of the other. When scaling, we add nodes to each location and expand the cluster. The process is straightforward."
"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 best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."
"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."
"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 helps with process restoration. With Veeam, we never had backup or restoration issues."
"It is a flexible, simple, and scalable software-based solution. It has agentless functionality with specific hypervisors and agent-based functionality with specific operating systems. It gives you the flexibility to use your own hardware and back up physical Windows, Linux, IBM AIX, and Oracle Solaris systems as well as VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and Nutanix VMs from one console. It also has integration with major applications that most companies are using, such as Active Directory, SQL, Exchange, or SharePoint. It has integrations, not just for the backup on the image, host layer, or hypervisor, but also for performing an application-consistent backup. It is helpful in backing up to the tape, cloud, DR site, etc. It is really flexible. It is really amazing that you can restore any backup on VMware, Azure, or AWS. As compared to the other solutions in the market. Veeam has really integrated a lot in the past years. It has the best performance and perfect replication."
"Its performance is fine. It supports us very well. It is able to support our policy for RTO, RPO, and other things that we need."
"WAN Accelerator helps tremendously with replicating our data because we have a large chunk of data that gets replicated between our two facilities."
"The restore capabilities are the most valuable features."
"Replication is most valuable."
"The replication feature has proven to be the most valuable feature for us."
"Very reliable and easy to use."
"The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path."
"The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement."
"The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"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."
"Data storage performance needs to be improved."
"My main concern about Veeam is that I hope our backups will still be secure in the event of a security incident such as a ransomware attack. In Veeam version 11 they do state that there is ransomware protection, but until it has been proven to be effective, I don't have any assurance that it will prevent data loss."
"The replication functionality only works for VMware environments. Veeam has a backup agent for AIX operating systems, and we will like to see the replication functionality available for the AIX operating system. Additionally, if the backup functionality for AIX to be included in the Veeam console would be an advantage."
"Veeam Backup Replication could improve by having more comparably with other hardware with the immutable copy feature."
"It is always nice to get products cheaper."
"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."
"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."
"It would be useful if we could integrate our on-premise VM solution with the Azure workload backup from the existing console. This would assist our customers in reducing the cost of hardware."
"A backup and replication solution should be able to back up a system and do recovery very fast. Even though Veeam Backup & Replication is able to meet most of our needs, it would be better if they can make it faster for backup and restore."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 39 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 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, Zerto and Veritas NetBackup.
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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...