It was straightforward. There wasn't anything super complex about it. 

We just deployed a new cluster last year. It took around three to four months before it was really cranking in full production. Once they are running in full production, they are adding value.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have 4,000 users in the company who are accessing the shared drive without any problems. Maintenance can be done by one person. 

The initial setup was straightforward. Since it was a green-fields implementation, we did not run into any issues. EMC, who later merged with Dell to form Dell EMC, even let us evaluate the platform in our own data-centre, so by the time we decided to procure the solution, all we had to do was to revert to “factory settings”. The longest part of the process was migrating around 84 TiB of data from our old data stores, as it happens with any data migration exercises. But once the data had been relocated, it became a matter of simply pointing the servers to the new data store entry points. Users were happy to take it from there, and were certainly overjoyed at the additional space they had to work with.

It's one of the easiest things to configure. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.

Initially, because in the first system that we had seven years ago the drive space was so small—I think they were 4 TB drives—there were a lot of shelves. We had over a petabyte of storage, so it was a lot of shelves. The installation, physically, was what took a really long time.

Now, the drive size is much bigger and the density per shelf is much greater. The actual shelf count is a lot smaller, so the physical racking is a lot easier. When we switched over to the new A200 nodes, we went from four nodes to one, four shelves to one shelf, when we did the conversion.

With the initial install, it has to format all the drives and that can take some time. It was a long time ago so I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I believe it took us a day or two to format all the drives. But we had 12 shelves. After that we were fine. 

But when you add on, it just brings them up and formats them into the array, relatively quickly. But the initial one, depending on how many singles you have, can take hours, and up into a day, to format everything.

The second installation that we did was a lot quicker. We stood it up, had those initial problems adding the nodes, but then we had to move it because we had to move data centers. When we moved it, it took less than half a day. We actually had to shut it down to move it out of a data center into another data center. We carried it over to the new data center, rack mounted it, fired the thing up, and it just took off like it hadn't even been moved. It handled a good "power-down" situation with no issues.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy to implement.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did receive some assistance from Dell for the setup and they continue to assist us with maintenance on a regular basis.

We have added a node to the solution. We added 12 of the H500 nodes to our cluster about a year and a half to two years ago. The process was really painless. We just physically installed the hardware, so rack it and stack it up, then make sure the hard drives are in place and the network connectivity is there. Once we started powering them on, we were able to quickly add them into the cluster, and the extra storage and performance were apparent very quickly.

The initial set up was straightforward. It was similar to adding the hardware where we just kind of rack and stack and get the back-end and front-end networking configured, then we have pretty much everything right there.

The initial deployment was a lot smaller. It only took a day to a day and a half before we got it going. It was only a 300 terabyte cluster at that point. 

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

If you have used the solution previously then the initial setup of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is easy, if not then it is difficult. If you have good planning and preparation then the implementation can take two to three days.

The initial setup has always been straightforward. The process of creating a new cluster is largely the same now as it was 13 years ago. You get your first node, then connect the serial port to it. You answer about 10 questions, then you're ready to go. The rest of the nodes are added by clicking a button. It's incredibly easy to set up, and it says a lot that the process has been the same for about 13 years. There's not really much to improve or simplify, because it is already incredibly simple.

Assuming the hardware was racked, you could have the cluster setup and your minimum three nodes joined within half an hour to 45 minutes.

The process of adding a node is very straightforward: It is pressing a button. This can take five minutes, then the process is complete. Once you have added new nodes, you can then remove old nodes. 

Understand your workload. Make sure you size and cost it correctly for the amount of metadata you expect to see on it. Don't undersize your SSD.

For the whole replacement this year, I got one of our junior staff members, who had have never actually used our PowerScale, to do the whole upgrade process. I just pointed him in the right direction. Because it was very easy, he managed to do it without any issues.

The initial setup for this solution is complex. The F900 uses Dell PowerEdge Servers instead of the traditional nodes. We needed to disable memory allocation features on those servers. When we did that, with EMC support, it brought the cluster down and it was down for a couple of weeks. 

The deployment involved a storage analyst, data center analyst, and EMC staff. The data center analyst handled the power requirements and cabling requirements. There are 15,000 users across multiple sites. 

This solution requires three people to handle maintenance. Maintenance requires verifying whether jobs are successful, identifying failures, and ensuring that replication is occurring correctly.  We do regular creation and deletion of shares, files, and folders.

Dell PowerScale's deployment is complex. 

The installation is quite simple and the deployment takes only a few hours. In my organization, we have a total of 26 system engineers, and among them, 11 are trained to handle Dell PowerScale. These engineers are responsible for installing, maintaining, and providing support for the product. We conduct maintenance regularly, typically with a focus on remote support, offering 24/7 assistance. For on-site support, our goal is to respond within four hours.

The initial setup is straightforward. Dell came in to install the solution and update the operating systems. After that, some administration and management tasks needed to be completed, and then the setup was complete. 

The first setup was pretty complex and a little different to do. Once we had the core system set up, the next deployment was much easier. The complexity came from changing our thought process, internally, regarding how we store files and how unstructured data really works, and then, how to efficiently use this.

Our deployment took about a week. We did a slow move-over, and we still continue to move anything we find over to it.

In terms of administration of the solution, for the most part it's just me who does a lot of the core work. All the users on the farm are using the system now, meaning about 350 people are accessing the data on the Isilon.

The platform is really straightforward to install and use, so we are not losing too much time setting up the storage as is and have more time to deal with the data on it.

The initial deployment took one day to set up. You do have to do some preparation for the setup, especially on the networking side. However, on the infrastructure, the platform is easy and straightforward to set up. The preparation was to prepare the networking, where you will be connecting the machines, such as, the typical networking configuration and VLANS, then you are ready to go.

It is immediate to add a new node and put that inside your configured cluster, e.g., when we installed the new PowerScale, the installation of the operating system was very quick. It was really unbelievable. We came from the first generation of Isilon where the installation of the operating system was not so fast. The F200 skyrockets onto the OneFS. Though, if we could afforded the F600, then that would be also faster. However, what we can afford is the F200, and we are happy now with that.

We have seen an improvement of performance without losing too much time when setting up the new platform.

I was not directly involved with the initial development of the solution. My involvement was just the management of the storage engineers managing the system. We like to keep everything in the Dell ecosystem so it was easy enough for us to turn it over to the storage engineers.

It wasn't complex at all. Even the upgrades and controllers that we've done have been pretty straightforward, however, we've got two guys today that manage the environment.

It's deployed across two data centers.

The solution does require maintenance. We do continuous controller updates and the like, however, we do it in conjunction with support.

Deployment usually takes about three to four months. We implemented it one network at a time.

Maintenance-wise, it requires standard stinging and patching to ensure that security is followed.

The initial setup is moderately easy.

We had a lot of practice with the simulator, so once we actually had the hardware and the real system in here, we were already familiar with how to manage and do a lot of the configuration. That's something that is not available with other vendors or other systems.

Moving from the old storage, which was from another vendor, was a significant bottleneck and took months.

Upgrading from the older generation Isilon was seamless. We just plugged in the new generation nodes and told the OS to evacuate the data from the old nodes and the data migrated without downtime.

In terms of users of the system, on the management side it's our systems administration teams, so there are a handful of people involved. The people actually using the storage are our customers and our internal teams.

Dell EMC were incredibly attentive through the deployment process. They met us on site and they took the time to understand our current environment, our current challenges, and they worked with us to make sure that we bought the licenses that were going to meet our needs for today. They also helped us plan for the licensing that we'll need into the future.

They met with our tech team and spent a day with us mapping out what our requirements were, looking at our environment, and making sure that we had the right networking, so that our foundation was right when we put it in. They physically installed the equipment and they continued to work with us over the next two weeks, just to make sure that everything was right. We put the PowerScale in when we were in production, at the end of a film, and we had no downtime at all. That was a massive concern for us, doing it while we were live in production, but they helped us move all the data across to the new system and we had no downtime.

We have a local IT company that introduced us to Dell EMC and this product, and they were also a part of that scoping session. They're called Davichi Computer Services, and they're amazing. We ring if we have a problem, and within a few hours someone's out there. If they can't solve it over the phone or can't remote-in, they'll come on site and help us solve the problem. Fortunately, since we put this gear in, we haven't had many issues. But even as we were learning to understand this gear they worked hand-in-hand with our IT team.

On our side, the deployment required one person, our IT manager. Everyone uses it, as an end-user, in our organization because all the data for our film production pipeline lives on it.

The initial setup is easy for an engineer. The time required for deployment, however, depends on the environment. If we're transferring data to existing infrastructure, a few hours should be enough. But if we're working with a new infrastructure, we must first fulfill certain requirements before we can migrate the data.

I was not involved in the initial setup or deployment of this solution. My understanding is that it was pretty straightforward. We had a little bit of a rough spot when we went to do a OneFS upgrade, however, that's due to putting in hardening. When we had to back it off to do the upgrade, the hardening didn't back out as easily as it went in. That created some snafu and we ended up undoing all of the hardenings across the board. We created our own scripts to do it and it was much easier to manage.

When we deployed just PowerScale. Every PowerScale installment went with a complete stack, that included the switching, the server-side, the VMware, and everything that went along with building a stack. Isilon only occupied about three or four days' worth of a six-week installment period. It was pretty easy on a per-installation basis.

We have the solution deployed in two locations, in our production data center, and in another disaster recovery data center. We're syncing data between the two and it's used by all our employees. That's where their personal drives are, along with corporate drives and departmental drives, that are off this storage as well.

There are three of us that maintain the solution. It's not a lot of work once it's all set up and running.

The initial setup was straightforward. We leveraged Dell entirely to implement it, and it took between two and three days to deploy.

Without the help of Dell's ProDeploy Plus, it would have taken us weeks to deploy.

It is very straightforward. It's a little complicated setting up, however, other than that, you just allocate file shares and maintain security patches, and management is easy. It's pretty similar to other systems. It's very straightforward once it's set up.

I deployed it myself. My implementation strategy was to just do it. I have a template that I modify for every deployment and I rack it a certain way so that we can manage the backend cabling, which is a really big deal. I rack it, set it up, and configure it.

We have it in our major data centers, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I do all the maintenance which includes dealing with failed hard drives. There are always errors popping up. I'm just keeping ahead of all the little things that come up, engaging with support, and so forth.

The initial setup is not complex. However, if you're not dealing with it regularly, it could be complex. It has a moderate amount of difficulty.

Deployment takes about two weeks and you need two people to handle it.

The implementation is simple. I am unsure about the deployment time as I work in the pre-sales department. But it might take approximately five to ten minutes to complete.

Dell PowerScale's installation is fast. You need one engineer to handle the deployment. Its maintenance is easy because of its high redundancy. 

The solution's initial setup is complicated.

The setup of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is not difficult for our team. However, it could be complicated for my clients.

The length of time of the deployment depends on the infrastructure. If there are more servers it could take more time. However, typically it does not take more than one day.

The initial setup was a bit complex for personal not knowledgeable with the solution. When you are just shown a manual, it does take a while to understand how everything works. It's not exactly straightforward.