Dell PowerScale (Isilon) Room for Improvement

JL
CIO at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Something that still could be improved upon is adding additional node types of different sizes to facilitate a better way to run in distributed offices. For example, we have a lab up in Flagstaff, but they don't have a lot of IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is not really appropriate to run this system at their location. So, we run it down here in Phoenix. It would be nice if there was a smaller solution that we could deploy up there that was still as cost-effective as the bigger solutions.

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.

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Yaswanth Yathaluru - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Storage & Backup Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We're struggling to find the NIXI protocol. It's for people needing to access using Windows and Linux. We're struggling with the UID mapping and how to configure mapping-related things. I'm looking at how to map those GIDs and UIDs. 

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Eric Burgueño - PeerSpot reviewer
High-Performance Computing Services Manager at The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited

The only thing that I think PowerScale could do better is improving the HTTP data access protocol. At the present, you cannot protect access to data via HTTP or HTTPS the same way that you can secure data access through other protocols like NFS or SMB. You can either access a file because it can be access by anyone in the organization, or you cannot at all. There is no in-between. HTTP is not considered a first-class data access protocol, so the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply.

However, with the recent introduction of S3 starting from OneFS 9, I believe the necessary plumbing is already there for HTTPS to also be elevated to a first-class protocol in the future because both protocols sit behind a web server under the hood. It does not sound like it would be too complicated to implement, but it would be a valuable feature and it is currently missing.

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Buyer's Guide
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
GU
Network Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The only problem with the WORM (write once, read many) feature is it does take up more space than if you just wrote a file, because it writes stuff twice. But it works for us for chain-of-custody scenarios, and it's built into the file system itself.

Also, on the PowerScale system, because of the magic that it does "under the hood," it is very difficult to find out within the system where all your storage is going. That's a little bit of a ding that we have on it. It does so much magic in order to protect itself from drive failures or multiple drive failures, that it automatically handles the provisioning and storage of your data. But by doing that, finding out why a file of a certain size, or a directory of a certain size, is using more storage than is being reported in InsightIQ, is very difficult to discern. It's the secret sauce of protecting your data and that makes it a little disconcerting for someone who is used to seeing if a directory is using 5 MB of space. So if you have a directory using a terabyte of space, it might be using a little bit more because of the way that the system handles data protection. That is something you have to get used to.

Also, a lot of people are not used to the tagging or the description in the InsightIQ application. We're used to using the normal nomenclature of terabyte, petabyte, etc. They utilize TB byte and PB byte. So you have to understand the difference when InsightIQ is telling you how much storage you have. It's different than what we're used to. It uses base-2 and the world is used to base-10. Discerning how much storage you actually have, from the information in InsightIQ, takes a little bit of math, but it's not very difficult. I wish they had an interface in there where you could click and it would report in the way the industry is used to, which is in terabytes and petabytes. It's nothing major, just something you have to get used to when you're looking at it.

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Hakan Pehlivan - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Bilgipark Görüntü ve İletişim San. Tic. A.S.

The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved. If you have a lot of nodes, for example, 15 nodes, and when you say you lost one node on the paper, the performance is not affected. However, if you have so much file count and fifteen nodes, losing one node really affects the performance. One of our customers had this issue.

Also, when you lose a couple of drives, it's a different structure, then you can lose data. It is clearer on the NetApp side, and you can create a rate group and a pool. So you will have more redundancy on the drives. For example, in a rate set for around 100 drives, you can lose around 20 drives, which depends on the configuration.

In NetApp, we will not lose data, but if you lose 20 drives in EMC, you will also lose data. Small systems like Dell PowerScale (Isilon) work perfectly with five, six, or ten nodes. Based on my experience, if you have 15 nodes in Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and lose one node, it creates some problems.

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DD
Works at Government of Nova Scotia

It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale.

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JG
Information Systems Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Simplify where you can. If you have a need for tiering, then that can be okay, but it can behave in ways that you may not expect. If it's at all possible to simplify and stick with one node type, your consistency will definitely stand up a little better. If you do have a workload where tiering makes sense, PowerScale does do a good job of that. That's the only real, "Gotcha," that we've run into.

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Steven Siu - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 51-200 employees

The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved.

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Paolo Corecco - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Consultant at Swisscom

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.

In an upcoming release, the solution should have security features embedded, not external software.

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RP
System Team Leader at Deakin University

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. 

There is a lack of object support, which they have only just rectified. 

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Mitch Leigh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Cincinnati children's hospital

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.

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AdityaKumar3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Working Student at HELLA

The product needs to improve CLI since commands are complex. The search option is also difficult since you must give the full path. 

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SK
Senior Data Manager at Poninfo

There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage. While it excels in managing file systems, enhancing features for more efficient handling of objects could make it even better, ensuring faster and smoother operations.

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JP
Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like to see more Iceland products in the cloud so that we can port our data into different environments if needed. I would also like to see a virtual appliance or software-defined Iceland product.

Version upgrades and patches take a long time to complete. This could be improved. 

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KB
Director of IT at NatureFresh™ Farms

There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things.

The refresh of the interface with version 9.3 did help a lot of the things. They are at least improving it.

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MD
CTO at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us. I think that will be available next year.

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JB
Lead Infrastructure Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal. They have immutable snaps that they can leverage, however, it would be nice to have something folded in with CyberSense where we could detect points in time when we need to do recovery for anything that may be compromised.

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AS
Project Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

Data storage performance needs to be improved.

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DavidColeman - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at a government with 11-50 employees

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.

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JIM PLOURDE - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like to see PowerScale become a multi-site active-active solution. I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities.

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BS
Senior Vice President, Product Development & Strategy at EarthCam, Inc.

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.

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Gehad-Said - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Presales Solutions Engineer ( DELL EMC & VMware) at Metra computers

The cost of Dell PowerScale is currently high and there is room for improvement.

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KW
Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

In terms of PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection, considering the environment that we're in, I don't have to really worry about ransomware. That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable had Isilon-specific plugins. That's what I'm looking for. If Tenable had specific Isilon plugins, when they do compliance scans, that would be ideal. Right now, the only plugins being used are the BSD plugins. When they scan across Isilon, they come back with all kinds of security findings which are false positives that my team then has to go and chase down. As far as Isilon security is concerned, it’s lovely. As far as being able to prove it, it’s not so lovely. I don't know if there's a partnership between Tenable and Dell that maybe we can bridge the gap on that one.

A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, when you then try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code. The feature I'm looking for is in 9.3. If it's not going to be available to download, they should stop telling me about it.

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DS
Senior Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

I'm happy with the product the way it is, however, I like the improvements that always come out with the new 1FS code upgrade.

Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker. 

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AH
Geo-computing Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

The management and monitoring tools comprise a disparate suite of products and the roadmap is very unclear. We've got four different products that look after the Isilon, management-wise, and it's a bit of a mess.

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NL
Sr. Storage Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

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.

We would like to see both performance and security improvements which are in all of the releases. We haven't leveraged S3 yet, however, at some point we're going to leverage S3. We're working towards the 9.0 releases. Therefore, we'd like to see some improvements in the protocols. 

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NN
Manager Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated.

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BL
Works

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.

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Paolo Corecco - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Consultant at Swisscom

The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers.

The price point would be too high for companies that don't need a very large amount of storage space.

The redundancy is a little bit expensive.

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Henry Chou - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior manager at Wen Wei Technology Co,.

The product’s expansion capacity, pricing clarity, and ease of use need improvement. There could be power sizing tools available similar to OneFS or H-Series.

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Branko Cirovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at Comtrade Group

Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price. 

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OI
General Director at miromix unitedMiroMIX United

Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy. 

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MW
Project Manager at Realnux

The solution's configuration needs to be more straightforward. Also, its performance could be better than Panasas. In addition, its price needs improvement as well.

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Naresh Ochani - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Newera Informatique pvt.ltd

The price of the solution could be reduced.

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SL
Senior Consultant at a tech company with 11-50 employees

The solution lacks a cloud version.

It would be useful if the solution could direct to AWS or Google Cloud effectively or have an AWS version. With the global lockdown conditions, you can't get to the site. It would be easier if it was connected to the cloud.

The solution can be a bit complex for those not well versed in the technology.

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Buyer's Guide
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Dell PowerScale (Isilon). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.