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 best thing is that it works. We don't have to maintain it too much; we usually upgrade once a year."
"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 tool comes with cheap disks and works fast for video content."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability and flexibility."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"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."
"Features with the most value are Instant VM Recovery, SQL Explorer and Exchange Explorer."
"Veeam is the gold standard for backup and recovery. The ease of use and reliability of this solution are real assets. Also, it has an ease of use to work with a third party vendor."
"It is a stable product with useful snapshot and replication features."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"The fast backup and restore feature is the most valuable."
"Sandbox feature is like a power tool for troubleshooting."
"Veeam Is very useful for most environments and can scale up in most environments - such as Amazon or Azure."
"For virtualization it's perfect."
"It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale."
"That said, for the other security features, it would be helpful if Tenable - and I know it's outside the scope of this question itself - had Isilon-specific plugins."
"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."
"We had some issues with level 1 support. We had to fight with them on repeated issues. There is room for improvement in level 1 support."
"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 solution's rate structure or rate redundancy needs to be improved."
"Dell PowerScale's deployment is not easy."
"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."
"The cloud part of it can be improved. There should be an option for Veeam in your own cloud, as compared to the Veeam cloud offering that's currently there. The rest of it is easy."
"I like the Acronis backup solutions on the block-based part of backups. That is a functionality that Veeam does not provide."
"I think Veeam needs to improve the file installation process, as well as more technical things like snapping feature issues. Sometimes during backup, when it's taking the scan snaps on the ESXi, it started and didn't remove the snapshot from there, which consumed storage on the EXSi. It could be improved with more technical depth. The response time for Veeam's technical support could also be improved."
"In Linux, I suggest you backup for a PostgreSQL database."
"There should be better use of the external hard drives."
"I have found that the reporting could improve in its structure."
"I would prefer it if the backup console did not require use of a specified program but rather that it could be opened from any website."
"I would like to see a storage application in the next version of the product."
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is ranked 1st in NAS with 40 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 NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, Pure Storage FlashBlade, Qumulo and HPE StoreEasy, whereas Veeam Backup & Replication is most compared with Acronis Cyber Protect, Azure Backup, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup and NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
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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...