We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and FreeNAS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Dell PowerScale's performance is good."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is all the capabilities together."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) integration with other solutions because of the standard file system protocol."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its scalability has been huge for us."
"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"
"Its stability is the most valuable. It is reliable, and we don't have to worry too much about it."
"FreeNAS is much simpler and easier to use than other solutions, but we don't have the complete range of features that come with the full version."
"The solution has been very stable so far."
"What I like about it is that I can work on it from any computer or any device. The initial setup is very simple. The setup wizard is really helpful."
"The ease of use of the 'jail', the management of backups, and copies to easily create test and pre-production scenarios have speeded up the development and distribution of business apps."
"It has the best storage capacity."
"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"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."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"They should include clustering for the solution."
"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."
"If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented."
"The one thing that I find difficult to do which is very time-consuming is that I like to have a backup of the important files."
"The support for S3 needs to be improved."
"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."
"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 37 reviews while FreeNAS is ranked 9th in NAS with 9 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while FreeNAS 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 FreeNAS writes "Open-source with great disk management and task synchronization". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas FreeNAS is most compared with StarWind Storage Appliance, Qumulo, HPE StoreEasy, NetApp FAS Series and Buurst SoftNAS. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. FreeNAS report.
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