We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Pure Storage FlashBlade 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."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."
"I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node."
"The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."
"The best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."
"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."
"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 onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."
"It uses the same platform for connectivity so integration is seamless."
"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."
"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."
"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."
"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."
"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."
"The UID mapping and how to configure mapping-related things is a struggle."
"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."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."
"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."
"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."
"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."
"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 3rd in File and Object Storage with 40 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 7th in File and Object Storage with 31 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Qumulo, HPE StoreEasy and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with VAST Data, MinIO, Pure Storage FlashArray, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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