Once you have set up your initial cluster, adding more capacity to it is extremely easy. It is so easy that one of our salespeople added a node to the cluster. Having a salesperson do something technical is always a little bit interesting, but they didn't have any problems at all. "Boom," and it works. 

This is one of the nice things that goes back to that whole ease of management. Being able to add additional capacity is pretty simple. You just buy the nodes and plug them in, as long as you have enough of the right kind of node types. However, if you meet all that criteria, it is that easy to do.

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. 

I have done forklifting, and it is a drag. I don't want to do that again. We want to just keep being able to grow as we need to ensure our customers have the resources that they need to do their work.

The solution is very scalable. 

At the beginning, we procured four initial nodes, which amounted to about 400 TiB of usable space. We now have just shy of 2 PiB of total installed capacity at each cluster. Our storage usage has grown quite a bit, moving from terabytes to petabytes, but I have no doubt that we will be able to continue growing at the same rate or even more in the future. The original Isilon had already been designed to scale to multiple petabytes, PowerScale will only continue to push that further. We highly value being able to grow our capacity without having to be concerned with platform limits.

PowerScale now also offers more choice when it comes to mixing and matching different types of storage nodes within the same cluster. For example, you can get all-SSD or NVMe nodes alongside old-fashion SAS disks, that you might want to consider adding when performance is critical in your environment. In our case, the performance we get without these new nodes is sufficient for our needs. The best part is that should we ever need to provide a faster pool of disks, there is no administration overhead to do so: just add the new node types, set the tiering rules that you want, and let the system rebalance itself. No partitioning, no moving data around yourself. It is transparent to the end-users as well as the administrators. You can even tier data to a cloud pool for the archive if you want! This simplicity is, again, one of the main reasons we decided to stay on the platform.

We were using it for video storage and we were pretty impressed with its scale-up and scale-out abilities. We are always looking at the ability of a platform for scaling up and scaling out, especially because it's file storage. This was the best thing on the block that was out there.

If the customer doesn't need more performance, you should be able to adjust the solution to expand just the capacity and not the performance.

This is an easy solution to scale. 

PowerScale lets us scale into much larger projects than we have ever been able to do. As far as I know, that is actually what sets us apart from our competition, as they aren't able to do projects as big, dense, or high resolution as what we are able to do.

We didn't have any storage administrators previously. However, from what we've seen on other systems, they would require them. Without growing our staff or expanding, we have been able to just bring this solution on without a lot of impact to the staff that we already had.

We have a small number of actual people using it. It's mostly just different computers accessing it. We have anywhere from 60 to 200 different computers accessing it at any given time. We have a small compute cluster that sort of skews the numbers into that 200 range. Right now, we have 95 connections going into it across our different systems.

I rate Dell PowerScale an eight out of ten for scalability.

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is scalable. It is easy to expand capacity.

Most of our customers are enterprise-sized companies and the solution is suitable only for companies with a lot of data. For example, you can have a start-up company dealing with a large amount of data, but only have 10 people working on it. In this case, you will need a solution with this capability.

The solution is scalable and is suitable for enterprise customers.

Pretty much everyone touches the solution in some way or another. It has been a bit different right now with COVID-19, since a lot of people have been recently working remotely. In any given day, probably 12,000 people have been using it. That is just going by the number of active connections that we have from staff, students, and researchers at any time.

We can't see anyway that we would ever reach the limits of the product in terms of scalability and our workloads. We have no concerns around scalability. 

It has a back-end network that it's managing to get switches with enough ports to plug the nodes in, if you want to go big. That is the most complicated part, not the actual management of storage. As you add more nodes, that management overhead remains largely the same. 

For larger scalability, I would be very comfortable with it. We would just have to do some good site planning to ensure that we have enough room for it.

Our usage is pretty extensive. It touches on almost every area of our organization. With the introduction object and support for Red Hat OpenShift, which they're releasing in OneFS 9.0, we are very keen to explore and extend the usage in those areas. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading our test cluster on OneFS 9.0 to specifically evaluate use with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes in clouds. It definitely has a very strong place now in the data centre, and we don't see it going away anytime soon, as we see more workloads going onto it.

This solution's scalability in an on-premise environment is impressive. We continue to throw large workloads at it and performance has been pretty stable. It has multiple nodes, which is useful when we have outages or code upgrades. We're still able to perform those without interruption of service.

My company has more than 1000 users for the solution, and it is scalable. 

This is a scalable solution from a file data perspective. Scalability can be more difficult because you need three nodes minimum to start a cluster. You need a lot of other hardware to provide that service. This solution is not scalable in the cloud.

One of the things I like the most about it is the fact that we can scale out now. If we need more space, we order more nodes and it just changes the file structure; it just expands. There are no more individual drives, new arrays, moving things around. It'll just be there.

The future-proofing of what we're doing is a great thing too, because in five years when we're ready to replace that node, just due to its age, we can put the new one in and tell it to archive the old unit. It will move all the files over, in the background, and then we will just remove the old unit. There's no more having to tell users that, "Oh, this whole share is moving and all this stuff is getting done."

It scales seamlessly. We started three nodes, then we added two and there were no problems. The impressive part: Now creating or expanding a PowerScale cluster is almost immediate. In the past, you needed more time. 

As of today, we have around 15 research groups doing work on the platform, but we have only started the production phase after weeks of testing.

This is a scalable solution. 

I rate PowerScale's scalability an eight out of ten.

The scalability is great. You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to spread out the load. We've added multiple nodes to the system since deploying it. The process is pretty seamless, and we are able to do it with no downtime. It's a very easy process to do.

The fact that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large was one of the great things with this solution. With the other systems you could add "Bricks"—that's what they call them—but you had to set up LUNs, and we spent too much time managing that part of the system. Here, you just add it in and everything just scales up. Being able to add new nodes and increase the storage without having to redo the storage pool is great. That's one of the reasons we went with PowerScale. That was definitely a big selling point.

We're relying on it completely. I don't know if there's anything that we're not using it for. We're using it in production at full capacity.

We’re confident about the solution's ability to meet unpredictable future storage needs. I don't think there's been anything that we've needed so far that they haven't been able to accommodate. We're planning on staying with the platform for the future.

We haven't added a node to the solution yet. We plan on putting in A200s, as we move between productions in our franchise. It's a new product for our team, so we're still trying to optimize what we already have. We haven't really looked to use any of their new features.

We haven't scaled the solution yet, but the reason that we could convince the board to allow us to invest in this technology was the scalability. One of the next challenges that we're going to have is how to store our historical project data. We need a solution that is going to be cost-effective, yet the data will still have to be readily accessible to our current production pipeline. The PowerScale and file pool policies will enable us to utilize the archiving, so that will likely be the next way we scale.

I give Dell PowerScale a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have 800 people using the solution.

In terms of increasing usage, we're not going to implement it elsewhere, however, we always have new employees coming on.

This product is expandable and it scales well. The scale doesn't change how you administer it. Whether it's a megabyte or a petabyte, it's all the same when it comes to managing it.

We added a node and it is easy to do. We simply asked, paid for it, and it was done. When choosing this product, it was somewhat important that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large.

This product will be able to meet unpredictable future storage needs with ease.

This is being used in a single department with no plans for expansion.

The scalability is awesome, this is why we have it. 

There are challenges when providing economies of scale for a large cluster, however, it's nothing. It's hard to quantify that because it is just a cluster, but we've been pleased with the scalability overall.

This is a scalable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. It offers multiple petabytes and tens of thousands of concurrent connections.

The solution can scale well. It has an automatic tiering system. You can have 60 petabytes of storage. The solution offers very powerful scaling.

Our organization has 100 to 200 Dell PowerScale (Isilon) users. Its scalability is an eight or nine out of ten.

Dell PowerScale is scalable. 

Dell PowerScale is scalable. 

We have two end users for the solution.

I rate the stability of Dell PowerScale (Isilon) a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable, however, it's quite complex, so it's not exactly straightforward. For organizations that have a lot of items they need to upgrade, it's good to have support to help. However, the solution can scale if a company needs to.

We have a few hundred users on the solution right now.