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."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."
"Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT."
"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 stability of the solution is good."
"There are also the policies that you set up on replication and purging files, and policies for something called WORM. That's a "write once, read many," where you can't overwrite certain files or certain data. It puts them in a "protected mode" where it becomes very difficult for someone to accidentally delete. We use that for certain files or certain directories, because we're dealing with video and some video has to be protected for chain-of-custody purposes. The WORM feature works great."
"The guaranteed performance, combined with the scalability through its scale-out capability, makes it an excellent choice."
"Dell PowerScale is a scalable solution. It allows non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance of the system."
"Ability to scale the number of nodes without having to build additional clusters."
"The Flash core models offer amazing performance."
"The most valuable feature is reliability."
"The initial customer technical support was efficient and effective."
"Stability-wise, this solution is fine."
"The power systems are very reliable if you are running 24/7 operations. For ongoing mission-critical applications, it's the best solution."
"The performance of IBM FlashSystem is very good. The new technology and high throughput have given us more confidence in the solution. The management of the system has improved and we can control the monitoring system alerts and multiple FlashSystems with the Enterprise Cloud Edition, which is free. The migration of recently stored data to a new flash is much easier. You can move your data because you can utilize it externally."
"The performance monitoring feature is useful as it can report in 15 minute intervals by hour, day, week, month, or by a custom date range."
"When it comes to the interface of the solution we did not encounter any challenges. Additionally, the solution has good documentation."
"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 solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers."
"There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage."
"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."
"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."
"Data storage performance needs to be improved."
"Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us."
"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 technical support in my region is satisfactory but it could improve. Support is very important for customers and downtime is very critical for us. We would like onsite or complete technical support which can help us to minimize our downtime or if problems occur."
"With regards to the IBM V7000 storage system, where we have multiple tiers of storage, a heat map would show I/O distribution across the tiers of storage."
"Additional licenses might be added for the fundamental licenses, such as those for copying and flash copies."
"Include an option to upload the support package to the IBM ECuRep when opening an IBM PMR."
"The solution should improve its pricing and the mechanism in the reduction pool."
"This solution needs a management console where we are alerted to issues and can report them, or escalate them through email or another method."
"Our customers have raised concerns about the limitations of the FlashSystem 5200 and 7300, which only offer a 32-gigabyte connection."
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 NetApp FAS Series, Dell ECS, 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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