We performed a comparison between Dell PowerScale (Isilon) and IBM Cloud Object Storage based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two File and Object Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression has drastically improved our efficiency ratios to make it an economical product. This solution has also had a positive impact on our employees' productivity because it reduces the amount of admin that our staff needs to handle."
"The solution provides massive performance, scalability, efficiency, and ease of management."
"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."
"It's easy to manage. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability and flexibility."
"PowerScale has made it extremely easy to scale file data across our organization. We have two implementations of Isilon. One is a replica of the other. When scaling, we add nodes to each location and expand the cluster. The process is straightforward."
"This is the best platform that we could have for storage utilization. It is affordable and scalable. At the end of the day, it's something that we find very easy to use."
"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."
"One of Cloud Object Storage's best features is infinite capacity. This is one of the main advantages if you don't want to use your own storage. You also have the ability to write only, write once, and read many. It's like tape storage but software-based. This feature is essential for financial institutions that require that kind of protection if you write backup or data there."
"IBM Cloud Object Storage integrates well."
"The most valuable feature I like is when you connect it via CLI plug-in...It is a stable solution."
"The standout feature of IBM Cloud Object Storage is its top-notch security, making it ideal for sensitive applications like mobile financial transactions."
"The integration itself is pretty easy. The access appliances create the connection between both environments."
"IBM has the most number of additional services, this is the main advantage."
"It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems."
"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."
"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."
"We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore."
"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."
"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[...]the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply."
"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a little bit pricey, and its pricing could be improved."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"IBM Cloud storage is not cheap, but it could be."
"One area where IBM Cloud Object Storage could potentially improve is in modernizing its underlying codebase."
"One improvement could be incorporating a feature similar to Dropbox's version history. This would allow users to track modifications made to files over time, which is particularly important for maintaining a record of changes. While the free version might not include this feature, it could be included in the paid version to provide added value to clients. Additionally, having a version history feature that allows users to access modifications made to files over the past three months could be beneficial."
"The performance could be better. It isn't bad, but everything is network-based, so you have a performance penalty on the network. You can never achieve the same performance as hardware. That's the disadvantage of cloud storage solutions in general. Cloud performance is one of the main issues clients have."
"If I had to choose one area, it would be making the consoles more intuitive would be helpful. Sometimes, they can be a little complicated if you're not familiar with them."
"IBM has limited cloud storage."
"The performance could improve in IBM Cloud Object Storage. The throughput or objects per second can have degradation."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 3rd in File and Object Storage with 40 reviews while IBM Cloud Object Storage is ranked 9th in File and Object Storage with 7 reviews. Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is rated 9.0, while IBM Cloud Object Storage is rated 8.0. 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 IBM Cloud Object Storage writes "Offers the ease with which you can move data between on-premises storage and the cloud and then retrieve it back on-premises when necessary". Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas IBM Cloud Object Storage is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage, MinIO, Dell ECS, IBM Spectrum Scale and NetApp StorageGRID. See our Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs. IBM Cloud Object Storage report.
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