We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp FAS Series, and NetApp Private Storage based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."The recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression has drastically improved our efficiency ratios to make it an economical product. This solution has also had a positive impact on our employees' productivity because it reduces the amount of admin that our staff needs to handle."
"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."
"The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature."
"This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"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."
"It has integrated snapshot and backup capability."
"It is very flexible. It integrates well with the public cloud and other components, so everything can be API driven. Therefore, it is very easy to automate it."
"The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage."
"The SnapMirror is a good tool because, as long as you're going NetApp to NetApp, it's ultimately the fastest way to move data. We replicate everything to another site for disaster recovery."
"Flexible and reliable storage solution with multiple features such as cloning, replication, and deduplication. Data migration can be done without any performance implications on the production systems."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Saves space with deduplication"
"NetApp has really added a lot of features over the years to improve the product and performance. They can do things now like control ingress. They can control egress."
"Very stable and very scalable."
"It gave us a platform which could clearly arrange all our files and volumes."
"The most valuable feature of NetApp Private Storage is out-of-the-box integration with the SAN switches. They are much easier compared to Dell solutions. Additionally, the connector that comes with the solution that allows connection back to the Cisco SAN switches is very good. In Dell, I would need to use an FCIP or CIP port that is required."
"As opposed to cloud, we have full control over security, use, who uses it. We own a number of different companies, so we can partition however we want."
"At the moment, we are extensively using SnapMirror."
"The most valuable feature is integration."
"Integration with other NetApp solutions and merging them is manageable."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"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."
"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 cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement."
"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."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage."
"Cluster mode needs to be more ubiquitous."
"I think this kind of infrastructure is mostly obsolete. To keep up with developments in this space, you need to move all these features to an All-Flash solution."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"I would like to see NetApp add incident support."
"Cost is always a factor. Some people choose EMC or Dell because they perceive NetApp as being more expensive."
"The biggest issue we face is parts delivery. There's no local warehouse in Myanmar, so if a customer encounters a technical problem like an IMEI issue, they have to wait a long time for replacement parts."
"The WAFL is slow."
"The solution can improve on the replication features."
"The solution could improve by having better support experts. For example, they do not have clear instructions on configuration."
"The users find the new version's GUI complicated to use."
"I think that it should work better with Microsoft solutions, more integrated with Microsoft. We also need integrated NAS and block storage."
"It is not the fastest storage solution."
"I'm not sure how easy it is to use on the cloud versus on-prem. If they have different user experiences, they should work to make the two as similar as possible to make it easy for a user to understand both even if they only deal mainly with one."
"We had to write a number of custom tools or scripts ourselves to use it as a staging area between our on-premises datacenter and our cloud installation."
"I would like to see the GUI management simplified in the next release."
"There may actually be so many features that the end-user gets lost in the volume."