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."This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. It offers business continuity and replication features."
"Its scalability has been huge for us."
"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."
"This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use."
"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."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"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."
"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."
"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."
"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."
"The solution has been very stable so far."
"Its stability is the most valuable. It is reliable, and we don't have to worry too much about it."
"It has the best storage capacity."
"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."
"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."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"The biggest weakness is small file handling. Small file compression options are not enabled out of the box. It would be good to have this enabled by default."
"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."
"They should include clustering for the solution."
"If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented."
"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version."
"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."
"The support for S3 needs to be improved."
"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."
"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."
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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