We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Panasas ActiveStor 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."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."
"PowerScale helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. There are now automated jobs such as backing up and replicating data, that reduce the footprint we have. Those types of tasks were previously done manually."
"The most valuable feature we started using, beyond the initial scope for the solution, is the multi-protocol system that allows you to access the same set of files using different network protocols like NFS or SMB. PowerScale’s Unified Permission Model ensures that data security and access permissions are honoured regardless of whether the client is a Windows desktop or a Linux server"
"The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"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."
"You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to it, and IT spreads 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."
"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."
"I am impressed with the tool's performance and bandwidth."
"We've found the product to be quite flexible."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"Its configuration needs to be more straightforward."
"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."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"The solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved."
"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."
"Dell PowerScale needs to reduce its price."
"We have received complaints from customers that the tool is not easy to use. The tool's local technical service is slow. The solution is good for Linux customers and not for customers with other operating systems like Windows. The solution should provide storage without client software integration."
"The solution is quite expensive."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 40 reviews while Panasas ActiveStor is ranked 14th in NAS with 2 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Panasas ActiveStor is rated 9.0. 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 Panasas ActiveStor writes "A stable solution with good performance and bandwidth". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Panasas ActiveStor is most compared with NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. Panasas ActiveStor report.
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