We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and IBM FlashSystem 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."Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node."
"Our main goal is to do disaster recovery with whatever solution we use and Isilon makes it pretty simple to replicate those workloads over to our secondary data center."
"It has allowed us to have more consistent quality controls. It has also allowed us to expand the number of servers in clients processing and accessing data, allowing us to get a lot bigger projects out the door."
"PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable features were the performance of the array, i.e., very low latency and high IOPS. Plus, the management interface is very easy to use."
"Ability to manage third-party arrays and virtualise them: One screen to control multiple arrays. Simplified administration."
"It's very easy to manage."
"The solution is very easy to configure and use."
"IBM FlashSystem is a flexible solution with plenty of features."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"The FlashSystem 900 consistently delivers performance below 1ms for read/write. This performance is essential for an effective SVC stretch-cluster configuration across two datacenters, and presenting active-active storage to the customer."
"Data storage performance needs to be improved."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"I would like to see increased reporting and statistics functionalities."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"The UID mapping and how to configure mapping-related things is a struggle."
"Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated."
"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 design is a little old-fashioned and could be updated. The rack is very primitive and designed in an older style."
"The installation is not easy. You need to have extensive knowledge to handle it."
"IBM could do more marketing and improve brand awareness. I had never heard of this product until a colleague told me about it. FlashSystem could add a few features, but it would probably increase the price. For example, Pure Storage offers instant snapshotting and partitioning. That would be nice to have, but I think the cost would go up."
"The only issue my team faced was transferring the data from the old system to IBM FlashSystem, which is an area for improvement in the solution."
"The pricing needs to be more competitive."
"Customization features must be improved."
"Enterprise data storage needs improvement. They should create a feature for data and file storage."
"It could be easier to implement."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 39 reviews while IBM FlashSystem is ranked 4th in NAS with 106 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while IBM FlashSystem is rated 8.2. 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 IBM FlashSystem writes "An easy GUI and simple provisioning but our model does not support compression". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and IBM Scale-out NAS, whereas IBM FlashSystem is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell Unity XT, NetApp AFF and Huawei OceanStor. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. IBM FlashSystem report.
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