We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and Veeam Backup & Replication based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Nasuni and others in NAS."The flexibility and the user-friendly interface are the most valuable features."
"Isilon is flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. Dell continues to release updates and patches which enhance the use of this solution. This includes offering ransomware protection."
"The best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."
"The solution's scalability is very good."
"Its scalability has been huge for us."
"The solution is stable."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"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."
"Storage Snapshot is a good feature and very safe."
"It helps with process restoration. With Veeam, we never had backup or restoration issues."
"I think that the scalability is very good. We can't compare it."
"The instant VM recovery feature is the most valuable. It is a very good tool for disaster recovery. It is also easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature is the instant recovery."
"It is a global major solution for quite a lot of people."
"The product allows us to use data more efficiently, reducing the cost of storage and backup time. It is vital to have data available in the shortest possible time."
"The backup and replication capabilities are quite good."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"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."
"If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal."
"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."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"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."
"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 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."
"While the Veeam Backup Replication tool can mostly back up all the data in the environment, the AIX from IBM backup capabilities nowadays could stand improvement as they are not featured on a single pane of glass."
"There's a lot of room for improvement surrounding the backup process."
"The replication functionality only works for VMware environments. Veeam has a backup agent for AIX operating systems, and we will like to see the replication functionality available for the AIX operating system. Additionally, if the backup functionality for AIX to be included in the Veeam console would be an advantage."
"If you upgrade too quickly, you may have issues."
"The solution needs more detailed reporting."
"There is always some room for improvement, especially with some of the different technologies such as DB2. Commvault has a DB2 agent, but Veeam still doesn't have it. We have to use the universal one for it."
"The solution could improve by having a version to be compatible with the Linux system. They have improved the storage depository using the Linux proxy and Linux storage, but it can completely run on the Linux environment it would be much better."
"The replicating from Veeam Backup Replication to Azure cloud could be improved."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 39 reviews while Veeam Backup & Replication is ranked 1st in Backup and Recovery with 329 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while Veeam Backup & Replication is rated 8.6. 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 Veeam Backup & Replication writes "Beneficial pricing model, user friendly interface, and many free features". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with Dell ECS, NetApp FAS Series, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Veeam Backup & Replication is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Azure Backup, Rubrik, Zerto and Veritas NetBackup.
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Assuming you want to keep the data within the datacenter, there are a few options:
For Small deployments (~20-100TB's), you could mount share(s) on any backup (media) server and backup the data up over the network using a file-system agent - Veeam could easily support this.
For Medium deployments (~100TB - 1PB), you could use any backup system that supports NDMP. Not sure if Veeam supports NDMP for Isilon, but there are a lot of other vendors that do.
For Large deployments (~1PB+), you may want to consider snap-replicate-snap - Kind of like the NetApp approach to data protection. Take Snapshots of the local Isilon, replicate to a remote (DR) Isilon, and take a snapshot of the DR Isilon. Some may argue that this is not a true backup methodology, but it scales well and you can set up many SyncIQ jobs with different RPO settings to support complex scenarios.
There are a number of alternative cloud solutions available e.g. Druva.
However, if the price is a key factor then you may benefit from by using an Managed Service Provider (MSP). MSP's white label large, credible & established platforms. They provide the same level of speed, uptime, resilience and security as a key brand name but can be as much as half the price. The management of the backup will be optionally yours or fully outsourced to the MSP.
Another benefit of the MSP model is that they will have other skills to complement your own internal resources potentially adding further layers of security and backend IT people to support your operation.
I have no experience with Dell EMC PowerScale though I do know that it is supported by Veeam.
A Veeam Scale Out Backup Repository can distribute the load across the PowerScale cluster via multiple Backup Repository Extents each defined to use a different cluster node DNS A record and path. When backups exceed the maximum file size limitation even with Veeam deduplication and compression, other considerations should be made.
Note: Disable the write coalescer on the share directory and all sub-directories used by Veeam. PowerScale is a complex system and therefore I would advise you to contact Veeam experts on how to deploy Veeam in accordance with PowerScale. But a Scale Out Back Repository is an option, also XFS with reflink supports any Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) configuration. MSP's are fine too if you are comfortable with having data outside your datacenter.
dsmISI VEEAM (general-storage.com)
It is possible to do it with most types of backup solutions, such as IBM Spectrum Protect.
But it requires a full scan to detect changed files.
The changed files will be the only part that will be sent to the IBM Spectrum Protect storage, using its progressive incremental forever (Always incremental backups).
It is also possible to use NDMP to protect Isilon storage, but that requires periodical full copies, and as Isilon can scale to multiple PB in size. It might not be efficient.
Regards,
Tomas
I did not have the opportunity to backup Isilon servers but, according to Veeam documentation, it is possible to backup NDMP servers data to tape. There are some limitations though: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/d...