Dell EMC Isilon X410 - NAS server - 69.6 TB
Mfg # X410-SATA-S07
CDW # 4038882
| UNSPSC 43201835
Quick tech specs
- NAS server
- 69.6 TB
- SATA 6Gb/s
- RAM 128 GB
- 4U
- 36 bays
- rack-mountable
- HDD 2 TB x 34 + SSD 800 GB x 2
- Gigabit Ethernet / 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Know your gear
With EMC Isilon X410, you get a highly versatile scale-out NAS platform that provides great performance and high capacity with unmatched efficiency.
Take advantage of high concurrency and streaming performance with the EMC Isilon X410. Support a wide range of workloads, including Hadoop analytics, large-scale home directories, medical imaging, life sciences research, digital media, and electronic design.
Take advantage of high concurrency and streaming performance with the EMC Isilon X410. Support a wide range of workloads, including Hadoop analytics, large-scale home directories, medical imaging, life sciences research, digital media, and electronic design.
Enhance your purchase
Dell EMC Isilon X410 - NAS server - 69.6 TB is rated
4.86 out of
5 by
22.
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Ryan Parker-Hill from
As you add more nodes in a cluster, you get more effective utilisation
What is our primary use case?
* Research data
* Departmental file shares
* Data centre storage: NFS
We have two data centres in our university. We have Cisco UCS, Pure Storage, and are heavily virtualised with VMware. PowerScale is our unstructured data storage platform. It provides scaled-out storage and our high-level NFS across applications. It also provides all the storage for our researchers and business areas, as well as students, on the network.
With the exception of block workloads, which is primarily VMware, Oracle Databases, etc., everything else it is on PowerScale. It definitely has allowed us to consolidate the ease of management.
How has it helped my organization?
With the quotas having fewer large pools of storage in the data centres, we typically only have one or two Isilon clusters. That gives us the ability to multi-tenant or allocate data to different applications and isolate workloads. It is very efficient when managing that volume of storage. We are not tuning it every day or week. The only time that we are really doing anything with it is if we're planning an upgrade of some sort several times a year. Outside of that, it just does what we want it to do.
We automate the vast majority of the things that we do on the Isilon clusters: provisioning of storage, allocation of storage, management of quotas wrapped into tens of thousands of students, and managing permissions. That's the level of support they have for their built-in API's, which is probably a huge game changer for us in the way that we manage the storage. It makes it far more efficient inside of PowerScale.
Compared to doing it manually, what we have been able to automate using the API is saving us at least tens of hours a month versus when we used to get service requests. We have even been able to delegate out to different areas. If we have an area with whom we do file shares, we delegate out the ability for them to create new shares and manage their permissions themselves.
The solution allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. We see this in the big refresh that we did earlier in the year. After you have clicked the "Join" button and joined, you go to the old node and click remove, then wait for it to finish. You don't have to configure anything when you add new node types, they are automatically configured. You can tune them and override things if you want, but there is no configuration required.
PowerScale has enabled us to maximise the business value of our data and gain new insights from it. It gives us the ability to have our data stored and presented via whatever protocol is required. Now, we can look at all these different protocols without having to move or duplicate the data.
The solution allows you to focus on data management, rather than storage management, so you can get the most out of your data. We looked at the types of data that we have on the cluster, then we just target it based on the requirements. We don't have to worry about building up different capabilities, arrays, RAID types, etc. We just have the nodes, and through simple policy, can manage it as data rather than managing it as different RAID pools and capacity levels. If someone needs some data storage, then we ask what their requirements are and we just target based on that. Therefore, we manage it as a workload rather than a disk type.
What is most valuable?
Their SmartQuotas feature is probably the thing that we use most heavily and consistently. Because it is a scaled-out NAS product, you end up with clusters of multiple petabytes. This allows you to have quotas for people and present smaller chunks of storage to different users and applications, managing oversubscription very easily.
We use the policy-based file placement, so we have multiple pools of storage. We use the cold space file placement to place, e.g., less-frequently accessed or replicated data onto archive nodes and more high-performance research data onto our high-performance nodes. It is very easy to use and very straightforward.
The node pools give us the ability to non-disruptively replace the whole cluster. With our most recent Gen6 upgrade, we moved from the Gen5 nodes to the Gen6 nodes. In January this year, we ended up doing a full replacement of every component in the system. That included storage nodes, switching, etc., which we were able to replace non-disruptively and without any outages to our end users or applications.
We use the InsightIQ product, which they are now deprecating and moving into CloudIQ. The InsightIQ product has been very good. You can break down the cost performance right down to protocol latency by workstation. When we infrequently do have issues, we use it to track down those issues. It also has a very good file system reporting.
For maximising storage utilisation, it is very good. As you add more nodes in a cluster, you typically get more effective utilisation. It is incredibly flexible in that you can select different protection levels for different files, not necessarily for file systems or blocks of storage, but actually on a per file basis. Occasionally, if we have some data that is not important, we might need to use a lower protection. For other data that is important, we can increase that. However, we have been very happy with the utilisation.
Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution’s OneFS operating system. In terms of group work, we have used it for about 13 years. The core feature set rollup has largely stayed the same over that time. It has been greatly improved over that time as well. So, it has always been that storage NFS sandbox, and they've broadened their scope for NFS v4, SMB3 Multi-channel, etc. They are always bringing up newer protocols, such as S3. Typically, those new features, such as S3, don't require new licensing. They are just included, which is nice.
Over the years, the improvements to existing protocols have been important to us. When we first started using it, they were running open source sandbox for their SMB implementation under the covers and they used a built-in NFS server in a free VSD. Whereas, with the new implementations that they introduced for OneFS 7 have had huge increases in performance and been very good, though there's not necessarily any new features. We even use HDFS on the Isilons as well at the moment. The continued improvement has been really beneficial.
It is incredibly easy to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. With CIFS and IBM Spectrum Scale, there just isn't the horizontal concern. I couldn't think of an easier way to deploy Petabyte NAS storage than using Dell EMC PowerScale.
What needs improvement?
The replication could lend itself to some improvement around encryption in transit and managing the racing of large volumes of data. The process of file over and file back can be tedious. Hopefully, you never end up going into a DR. If you do go into a DR, you know the data is there on the remote site. However, in terms of the process of setting up the replicates and filing them back, that is just very tedious and could definitely do with some improvement.
There is a lack of object support, which they have only just rectified.
For how long have I used the solution?
About seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability has been exceptional. I've been very happy with the stability of it. In the last six years, we have pretty much been disruption free. Prior to that, we have had one or two issues, which we worked with their support to fix.
We had a major refresh at the start of the year when we replaced one petabyte at one site and a half a petabyte at another site. This completely replaced everything and took us about a month. It was finished with one staff member overseeing the process, moving the data and roping in one or two other staff at different times to help with the physical backing.
They are quite heavy, so you always want to have two or three people involved. It has very minimal staff management required. For example, once the hardware is racked, it needs just one operator who joins the nodes, waiting for the data to move over. Internally, this is non-disruptive to the user.
Firing up the old nodes, that is more of a management thing.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Pretty much everyone touches the solution in some way or another. It has been a bit different right now with COVID-19, since a lot of people have been recently working remotely. In any given day, probably 12,000 people have been using it. That is just going by the number of active connections that we have from staff, students, and researchers at any time.
We can't see anyway that we would ever reach the limits of the product in terms of scalability and our workloads. We have no concerns around scalability.
It has a back-end network that it's managing to get switches with enough ports to plug the nodes in, if you want to go big. That is the most complicated part, not the actual management of storage. As you add more nodes, that management overhead remains largely the same.
For larger scalability, I would be very comfortable with it. We would just have to do some good site planning to ensure that we have enough room for it.
Our usage is pretty extensive. It touches on almost every area of our organization. With the introduction object and support for Red Hat OpenShift, which they're releasing in OneFS 9.0, we are very keen to explore and extend the usage in those areas. That is part of the reason why we are upgrading our test cluster on OneFS 9.0 to specifically evaluate use with...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2020-11-08T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Jace Gregg from
Ensures our data quality is very high and that our consistency in processing is a lot more static
What is our primary use case?
We use it for storage in a scale-out data processing system.
It is a physical storage platform. We have several different nodes that all act as one large storage cluster.
How has it helped my organization?
PowerScale has allowed us to bring data acquisition and some of the initial data processing that we would typically do in the field here on-premise. That has let us speed things up from a data delivery standpoint.
It has let us really optimize our consistency. We've been able to take something that several different people were doing out in the field and just maintain it here with one person able to do a really good job of making sure that our data quality is very high and that our consistency in processing is a lot more static. It has prevented quite a few possible issues, which has also allowed us to expand from some of our jobs, where we used to go and acquire this data in the field. The systems out there have three servers, and we're able to expand up to 10 or 12 servers all processing that data. Therefore, it's made our turnaround on data pretty quick.
PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It makes it to where we don't have to have a full-time storage guy on-premise. We are able to manage our storage on PowerScale without needing to have a team.
The solution does provide us the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. However, that is not something that we typically do, as we have a fairly large cluster. We did have one instance where we had a very large job that was going to require about two petabytes of data. We were able to purchase that and get it installed pretty quickly, which definitely helped us out.
It is simple to use the solution for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale. We have almost three and a half petabytes, and it's a very low impact to our team as far as the amount of effort and babysitting that we have to do on it. This has really changed the way our company can acquire and process data in the field, allowing us to differentiate ourselves against all our competitors. None of the other competitors in our market are able to handle jobs, either in the size or density that we have been able to do so far.
PowerScale allows us to focus on data management, rather than storage management, getting the most of our data. This is mainly because the system almost manages itself. Instead of having to sit and handle storage volumes, RAID groups, LUNs, or things that in traditional storage architecture our group would have to manage, we are able to just create shares. The end user side is able to access those shares just like they would any regular storage or file server. That really helped us make sure that we're not having to manage storage the way we would with a traditional block storage or any other storage that we've tried so far.
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.
What is most valuable?
It has the ability to access the file system from multiple hardware platforms from a client perspective. We have Linux and Windows machines able to access the same file system, then we also have the ability for all those systems to be able to access the same data at pretty much the same time. That helps us quite a bit, as it lets us expand the number of processing nodes that we can use to access the data at the same time. This helps us to scale out the front-end data processing to speed things up quite a bit.
We do have some of the policy-based tiering that seems to be working fairly well.
As far as we can tell, it does a really good job of maximizing storage utilization. For us, the storage protection is a bit more important. The protection schemes that we have seen so far have been very effective at ensuring that our data is protected, while still being able to access as much as possible. That is one of the strengths of the OneFS software.
It definitely helps us maximize the value of our data. We don't necessarily try to get any insights into it other than we just acquire the data and process it on our client's behalf.
We have been able to consolidate and centralize our systems into one system. It lets us take data from the field and get it in one spot, where it can get quite a bit bigger. It also has a lot more processing systems to access our data and get it out the door a lot faster.
What needs improvement?
Simplify where you can. If you have a need for tiering, then that can be okay, but it can behave in ways that you may not expect. If it's at all possible to simplify and stick with one node type, your consistency will definitely stand up a little better. If you do have a workload where tiering makes sense, PowerScale does do a good job of that. That's the only real, "Gotcha," that we've run into.
For how long have I used the solution?
We are probably on our seventh or eighth year of using PowerScale now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had a few issues here lately, as far as power and kind of unusual things in the building. We've been really surprised that PowerScale was able to work around those issues without any sort of data loss, when we have had multiple nodes go offline. After we got everything back online and running again, PowerScale worked without any issues. As far as resiliency and availability go, I am happy with the solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
PowerScale lets us scale into much larger projects than we have ever been able to do. As far as I know, that is actually what sets us apart from our competition, as they aren't able to do projects as big, dense, or high resolution as what we are able to do.
We didn't have any storage administrators previously. However, from what we've seen on other systems, they would require them. Without growing our staff or expanding, we have been able to just bring this solution on without a lot of impact to the staff that we already had.
We have a small number of actual people using it. It's mostly just different computers accessing it. We have anywhere from 60 to 200 different computers accessing it at any given time. We have a small compute cluster that sort of skews the numbers into that 200 range. Right now, we have 95 connections going into it across our different systems.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have had no issues at all with our technical and customer support. The product watches after itself. If there is a hard drive replacement or anything like that, it phones home and Dell EMC lets us know. So far, we have had good luck getting equipment out and getting service on anything that we've needed.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
With all the other file systems that I have worked on in the past, if you had the three point four petabytes that we have right now, then that would require at least two people to work on them in a mostly full-time capacity. Because of the PowerScale's simplicity, we're able to just let our infrastructure team manage it, and it's a really low impact to them. Right now, we've two people who manage it along with all the other storage and networking that we have on-premise.
How was the initial setup?
We have added a node to the solution. We added 12 of the H500 nodes to our cluster about a year and a half to two years ago. The process was really painless. We just physically installed the hardware, so rack it and stack it up, then make sure the hard drives are in place and the network connectivity is there. Once we started powering them on, we were able to quickly add them into the cluster, and the extra storage and performance were apparent very quickly.
The initial set up was straightforward. It was similar to adding the hardware where we just kind of rack and stack and get the back-end and front-end networking configured, then we have pretty much everything right there.
The initial deployment was a lot smaller. It only took a day to a day and a half before we got it going. It was only a 300 terabyte cluster at that point.
What about the implementation team?
Our vendor helped us out with the deployment, so they were able to send one or two of their engineers (depending on whether it was the addition or initial deployment). One person can do it, but two or three people will help get it done pretty quickly.
What was our ROI?
I think we have seen ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is expensive, but I think it's a fair value because it does manage itself. It definitely is much simpler than any of the other scale-out storage platforms that we've looked at in the past.
It is a bit higher priced than some of the other systems. I do think it's worth the value, but it's definitely not cheap.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We were looking at large scale storage platforms. We had a good relationship with our storage vendor who recommended this solution. So, we took a look at it and did a bit of a demo, working with our software vendor to ensure everything was working fine, then just went out to the races at that point.
We did not evalua...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2020-11-11T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Keith Bradley from
Allows us to see everything as one large volume, instead of having multiple volumes all over the place
What is our primary use case?
We used it originally for archiving our video storage, and then we expanded it to include user shares. All of our unstructured data has been moved to PowerScale.
How has it helped my organization?
We moved our shares over. Now, instead of taking up a large amount of space on a virtual machine, our shares take it up on one appliance. The load on that virtual machine is much less and it makes it easy to future-proof it, because now we don't have to move it again in the next migration of servers.
We have saved about 30 percent on storage with it. And as we grow, we get more space, meaning the efficiency improves each time we add a node. We went from 75 percent efficiency to 82.5 percent efficiency when we expanded.
The solution provides us with the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud. That really is nice. We did one use case where we put it out at the edge, and it was nice to have the Isilon at the edge. It really helped improve things. It helped the storage of the cameras, and it helped get the data back to the core in a reasonable time. It allowed us to go from the edge to the core and then up to the cloud, instead of trying to go from the very edge to cloud.
PowerScale also allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It simplifies the storage. It allows us to see everything as one large volume instead of having multiple volumes all over the place.
And when it comes to the business value of our data, it allows us to see what's being used and how it's being used, and we can do so much more quickly and efficiently. As a result, we can better evaluate how we're storing the data.
It has also helped us to reduce data silos. We used to have four video servers out there, all storing data. On the home farm, now, we're down to one server storing data in one location, and that includes all the user shares.
All our data is in one place and that has increased performance. We could never afford to say, "Let's have this information on solid-state," and allowed the OneFS to decide, based on usage, of where it would be stored: on a fast drive or on a slow drive. It automatically does that in the background for us, instead of our having to manually move it and then have the user change where they get the information from.
In addition, it has simplified management by consolidating our workloads. It's all done in the same portal now. And while it hasn't reduced our number of storage admins, it has definitely reduced the time we spend looking at it, so we can focus on other efforts. It saves me about five hours a week.
Another benefit is that it allows us to focus on the data rather than where it's stored. Now, we don't have to worry about moving it around from place to place to get efficiencies out of the data. We just have it all in one place. The single interface, the SmartPools policy, decides where it needs to reside.
What is most valuable?
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, as well as the access users get. But the end-user doesn't distinguish the difference between a file and its folder; the end-user doesn't have to see the difference.
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. There are no performance issues based on how large the storage is.
Adding a node is as simple as racking and stacking the items. It takes about two to three hours to put it into the rack. Once you have it all wired up, it takes you about an hour or 90 minutes with Dell, just to configure things and make sure it's all working. Then you just redefine your policy for where you want the items stored. We just expanded to include the solid-state, a full F200 node, and we just redefined where we wanted those files stored, whether on the super-fast solid-state or on the slow archival mode. Then, overnight, it ran that script and moved all the files around to help increase performance.
We also use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. It gives us better insight into where the data's stored and the access times involved. It gives me a better understanding of what's really being accessed and helps me decide what I can move to slower drives first, and what needs to stay in the front-end and remain very fast.
What needs improvement?
There aren't many templates still coming out for it. They need to provide templates so we can copy and paste what we've done in the past to future, new things.
The refresh of the interface with version 9 did help a lot of the things. They are at least improving it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Dell EMC PowerScale for about a year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's very stable. It's one of the first solutions that I feel comfortable working with during the business day, while people are using it, knowing that I can change things and it's not going to take the system down.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
One of the things I like the most about it is the fact that we can scale out now. If we need more space, we order more nodes and it just changes the file structure; it just expands. There are no more individual drives, new arrays, moving things around. It'll just be there.
The future-proofing of what we're doing is a great thing too, because in five years when we're ready to replace that node, just due to its age, we can put the new one in and tell it to archive the old unit. It will move all the files over, in the background, and then we will just remove the old unit. There's no more having to tell users that, "Oh, this whole share is moving and all this stuff is getting done."
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support has been really good. It's pretty intuitive to put a ticket in, both through their email and through the calling system. It's usually pretty seamless to get to talk to somebody to actually resolve the issue.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before PowerScale it was just MD Storage Arrays, the standard, and the LUNs that you'd have anywhere. We eliminated that with this. We originally started with PowerScale for our video system. We were looking for a better system, in the long-term, to store our archival video and process it. We looked at unstructured data solutions and picked PowerScale for that and for the future-proofing.
Also, because we are a large Dell EMC shop, it allowed us to keep it all on the same platform. In looking to do things on a larger scale, it allowed us future compatibility, much more easily. Its ability to meet unpredictable future storage needs looks great. It feels like a great solution and it was the right direction for us.
How was the initial setup?
The first setup was pretty complex and a little different to do. Once we had the core system set up, the next deployment was much easier. The complexity came from changing our thought process, internally, regarding how we store files and how unstructured data really works, and then, how to efficiently use this.
Our deployment took about a week. We did a slow move-over, and we still continue to move anything we find over to it.
In terms of administration of the solution, for the most part it's just me who does a lot of the core work. All the users on the farm are using the system now, meaning about 350 people are accessing the data on the Isilon.
What about the implementation team?
We used the reseller, Dell EMC, for the deployment, and it was a great experience. They were there to help us and make sure we understood where we were going and what we were doing.
What was our ROI?
The fact that, with PowerScale, we could start with a few nodes and scale very large made it very cost-efficient for us. It allowed us to start out, see what it can do, and evaluate the product before we actually did a larger investment in it. We invested into it again three months later.
I'd like to say we have seen ROI because we're feeling like we're really starting to store data better and understand what's going on, more than we did a year-and-a-half ago.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's one of those situations where you have to find the right price for you. When we talked to the reseller, we were able to negotiate the right price for what we needed.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at HPE and IBM.
I liked the interface of the PowerScale much better than the other ones. It was more intuitive. I logged on and could almost get to work with it right away. I felt like I could hop on and just start using it, whereas with the other ones I felt that there was a larger, steeper learning curve.
What other advice do I have?
Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution's OneFS operating system. The last addition was its CloudPools and that allows us to do backups to the public cloud for the data that we want to keep but don't even need on-prem anym...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2020-10-25T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Anthony Hallett from
Easy to manage, consolidates disparate storage products, and improves operational efficiency
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is unstructured file storage. It is pretty simplistic and architected in a very simple way.
The product centralizes all of our subsurface digital data. It also includes normal PDFs and Word documentation that we have.
How has it helped my organization?
Centralizing our data with the Isilon has helped to take the pressure off of our IT department, without having to move around our 32 old file server systems. In general, it has made our operations more efficient.
We use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance remotely, although it represents a very small part of our storage operation.
Dell regularly adds new features and one of the recent upgrades promised performance improvements, which was a big draw. At this point, I can't confirm whether or not there have actually been any improvements noted. The SyncIQ features are changing dramatically to be a bit more flexible in the future, which is something that I'm keen to see.
This solution allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It's not something that took up much time before so it hasn't had a large impact, but it's good that we don't have to do it.
Using this product has enabled us to maximize the business value of our data because now, we can store all of our data in one place. This means that we have the agility of recalling large volumes that we would otherwise have had on hard drives in different places. Initially, we didn't have the storage required to hold all of the data together, and now, it's coming more into play as we look into dashboarding and TIPCO. We can now look at our data as a whole, instead of in little parts that were as such because of limitations we had in storage.
This solution has helped eliminate data silos. At the moment, we only have subsurface data on the unit and don't have any production data. However, it's helped us to be able to compile our data and expose it to the company. In this aspect, it has stopped data silos.
We have been able to consolidate our workloads, meaning that our storage management has been simplified. Having it all in the same place, not having to expand it all the same, and not having to rejig our backups has made it easier to work with.
What is most valuable?
Our users are able to easily roll back snapshots without going through IT.
An important feature for us is scalability.
This product gives us a backup system with everything online, which is a big win for us.
Having an on-premises solution like Isilon is better for us than a cloud-based solution in terms of both price and performance. Price-wise, moving to the cloud is an unknown cost, as opposed to a known one. Performance is affected by latency because the cloud data center is between 3,000 and 3,500 kilometers away. This distance has a significant effect on latency.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using the Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) devices for approximately three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability has been rock solid. We've had two incidents; one of those was its fault and that was in the very beginning. It was resolved within a reasonable timeframe. The other incident was external switching.
So, it's not been without some problems, but in the time we've had it, that's nothing significant.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This product is expandable and it scales well. The scale doesn't change how you administer it. Whether it's a megabyte or a petabyte, it's all the same when it comes to managing it.
We added a node and it is easy to do. We simply asked, paid for it, and it was done. When choosing this product, it was somewhat important that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large.
This product will be able to meet unpredictable future storage needs with ease.
This is being used in a single department with no plans for expansion.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support has been alright and I would rate them an eight out of ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to having the Isilon, we had multiple file storage systems. We used to have 32 old server file systems and in conjunction with Dell, we came up with this solution as a way to consolidate them into one centralized storage.
Before Isilon, we really didn't have a solution, and now we can focus more on data management rather than storage management. All of our subsurface data was spread over the existing servers. We had an issue where we couldn't go over to terabytes because it affected the backup, so we always had to move data around and some of our projects were starting to span over to terabytes, and that was causing a headache.
With Isilon, we don't have that problem anymore and we're not shifting data around. It's all in one spot. We're not unloading hard drives and loading hard drives onto the system. We just unload them once and keep them there and then they get tiered appropriately.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. We leveraged Dell entirely to implement it, and it took between two and three days to deploy.
Without the help of Dell's ProDeploy Plus, it would have taken us weeks to deploy.
What about the implementation team?
We used ProDeploy Plus, which is Dell's implementation service that is available at an additional cost.
One storage engineer is suitable for deployment and maintenance.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment, although intangible.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
One of the reasons we chose this on-premises solution is that it's a known cost. In our case, lifting to a cloud-based solution was an unknown cost and in the current environment of tight budgets, having a known cost is a huge benefit.
We paid an additional fee to have Dell's ProDeploy Plus team implement it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other products in advance of choosing Ipsilon.
What other advice do I have?
This product provides policy-based automation for managing storage, but we don't use automation in our use case. Similarly, it provides support for the S3 protocol but it is something else that we don't use.
In our use cases, the data remains where it is and doesn't go anywhere. We don't use any of the edge or cloud features.
My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to purchase the extra support from Dell to deploy it. This is what we did and if anybody else is going down that path then I'm sure they'll be fine.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-01-13T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Mitch Leigh from
Data storage and management system that offers reliability and ability to share data across multiple channels
What is our primary use case?
You use this solution to facilitate sharing data access across multiple platforms. We are a children's hospital and have a lot of PHI data that is critical to keep secure.
How has it helped my organization?
One of the benefits that we have seen from our research department is quotas and chargeback. They are able to control costs based on the projects that they're given and the grants that they receive from a state and federal level. They are able to track the quotas and chargebacks, which is made possible through Isilon.
Implementing Isilon has removed the previous silos that existed between different teams. Everyone has been able to virtually separate their resources, but still store it physically on the same box.
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 if we have. Those type of tasks were previously done manually.
Isilon also makes it possible to delete large amounts of data and fix active directory permissions. Previously, we would have to create scripts and run them manually. It has also reduced our risk of data loss and given us the ability to recover from snapshots and replicated data.
What is most valuable?
We have data that is accessed from multiple OS's from different models and in departments in our company. The ability to serve up that data to all those different platforms is very useful.
One of the best features of Isilon is its reliable performance and ability to report on its performance. Reliability is really important in our environment, with a 24/7 shop that serves patients. In many instances, data access is critical.
Prior to Isilon, we had to access data from multiple different platforms. This solution offers unified storage and the ability to consolidate and migrate data which was a big step forward. It allowed us to cut costs by eliminating multiple platforms, putting it all on one array.
What needs improvement?
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 has it been since someone's accessed a file.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This solutions scalability in an on-premise environment is impressive. We continue to throw large workloads at it and performance has been pretty stable. It has multiple nodes, which is useful when we have outages or code upgrades. We're still able to perform those without interruption of service.
How are customer service and support?
The EMC field support is great. They're easily accessible. We have a specific person we call which is invaluable. We are able to open tickets online instead of spending hours on the phone and receive a response, no matter what day or time. The only challenge we sometimes experience is a language barrier.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup for this solution is complex. The F900 uses Dell PowerEdge servers instead of the traditional nodes. We needed to disable memory allocation features on those servers. When we did that, with EMC support, it brought the cluster down and it was down for a couple of weeks.
Deployment involved a storage analyst, data center analyst and EMC staff. The data center analyst handled the power requirements and cabling requirements. There are 15,000 users across multiple sites.
This solution requires three people to handle maintenance. Maintenance requires verifying whether jobs are successful, identifying failures and ensuring that replication is occurring correctly. We do regular creation and deletion of shares, files and folders.
What was our ROI?
We are able to better handle and reign in budgets by making departments responsible for the data that they are consuming for the grants that they get. The deduplication of data has freed up some of that storage costs that we've traditionally experienced. Some of the newer technology allows us to store more data on less equipment, which means that we're using less footprint in our data center.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated Pure Storage but their support was unreliable. We need fast and reliable support, and EMC has always proven that when we have an outage, they're there to help us.
What other advice do I have?
The user interface is very simple to use. Support is critical when deploying this solution. When we were deploying the F900, there were a lot of problems that were beyond our scope. We frequently needed to touch base with system engineers from EMC.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-11T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1852575 from
Can set it up, use it, and not worry about it after set up
What is our primary use case?
We have to deal with a lot of data and be able to get it across to and from different locations and be able to store it. We use this solution for these purposes.
How has it helped my organization?
Overall, Dell PowerScale (Isilon) has made management of the data and the networks easier. Because we are using the same solution for multiple platforms, our personnel have become more efficient at it.
What is most valuable?
The fact that we were able to set it up, use it, and, for the most part, didn't have to worry about it after we had it set up has been has been valuable.
PowerScale's cybersecurity, including ransom protection, is very good. We've never had an issue with it.
This solution has helped free up employees to focus on other business priorities.
What needs improvement?
Data storage performance needs to be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it for several years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's been very stable.
How are customer service and support?
I would give technical support a ten out of ten. We generally don't need a lot of technical support unless something breaks.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used another Dell product, and we switched because it became outdated.
How was the initial setup?
Deployment usually takes about three to four months. We implemented it one network at a time.
Maintenance-wise, it requires standard stinging and patching to ensure that security is followed.
What was our ROI?
We haven't lost any data, and that's probably the biggest return on investment, being able to maintain data integrity.
What other advice do I have?
Look at the situation. A technical solution has to meet the requirements, and you have to know what you need in order to figure out what tool's going to best work for that.
Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is a good product. It does the job, and it takes care of the data. So, I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-16T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1851960 from
Primary storage solution that is flexible in supporting various data loads and is easy to scale
What is our primary use case?
We have connected our mainframe system to Isilon. The NFS is being provisioned from Isilon and hosts millions of files. It is our primary storage solution.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
We are working with Dell to implement a cyber secure solution, which is called the air gap solution. We also have Dell Data Domain systems that we leverage to backup the data from Isilon or any other system into Dell Data Domain. From Dell Data Domain, we offload that to air gap and secure the data into the air gap or Isilon solution.
The system is robust. It has had a big impact on the efficiency of our organization. It serves as storage for our core application, which is a revenue-generating application. It plays a key role in our business.
Isilon has the ability to scale file data, although we have not explored this within our business yet.
What is most valuable?
The offloading of data from Isilon to ECS object storage has been cost effective.
What needs improvement?
Isilon has limitations on the number of files that can be generated.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service for this solution is really good. We have a dedicated support account manager and system engineer from Dell who assist us when we need it.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We do have another solution that we leverage for our NFS protocols. The other system is a little bit more efficient or robust. We also have protocols that we leverage on the other system. They are really good compared to Isilon.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use.
What other advice do I have?
I'm impressed by the way the system provides scalability. From an administration standpoint, it's really simple to use. The GUI and interface is easy to manage.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-14T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1851951 from
Data access and security platform that has drastically increased efficiency ratios
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution for high concurrency connection and data capacity.
How has it helped my organization?
It has improved our organization by filling a gap in some of our home-built applications. It provides a single unified space across scalable infrastructure. There are no longer multiple points of entry required for the workload.
With the recent introduction of inline deduplication and compression, it 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 need to handle.
PowerScale has helped us reduce our overall risk. We lean on the regulatory compliance and SCD drives to ensure data security. It offers various data multi-protocol capabilities. They recently introduced S3, as well as traditional file workloads including SNB, NFS and SFTP. The security is built in and includes SED and self-encrypting drives. This allows us to instantly monitor compliance.
What is most valuable?
The scalability of this solution has been most valuable. We have been able to start with a specified workload size and be able to double, triple or tenfold it without having to change the environment.
What needs improvement?
The biggest weakness is small file handling. Small file compression options are not enabled out of the box. It would be good to have this enabled by default.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a scalable solution. It offers multiple petabytes and tens of thousands of concurrent connections.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Other solutions that we have used, have been administratively intensive.
What was our ROI?
We have been leveraging this platform and folding it into our application stack. This has removed the need for a third party solution which has reduced overall costs and provided ROI.
What other advice do I have?
This solution requires maintenance. Once the platform is properly deployed, there is a BAU component of maintenance including the replacement of hard drives.
I have been really happy with this product. I have not seen other products in the marketplace that offers this stability and maturity.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-13T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
David Devlin from
Primary file storage solution that offers a seamless and consistently reliable experience for users
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution for the primary file storage for our organization for both the government and health department of Nova Scotia. We use the data domain for backup along with Isilon for our file storage.
How has it helped my organization?
This solution offers flexibility in supporting various data workloads and is very easy to work with. It is our go-to solution for all data storage. It is stable, it runs in the background and our users are barely aware that it exists. It operates seamlessly and this is the biggest benefit for or business.
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.
We have eliminated the need for any silos in our data center using this solution. It has also freed up our employees' time to focus on the other business priorities because it is easy to manage and add nodes when necessary. Replication works seamlessly. We are able to meet all of our auditors and governance requirements.
What is most valuable?
The way it scales easily, is easy to use and its security are the most valuable features.
What needs improvement?
It would be nice to see tools like Superna Eyeglass built into PowerScale.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is an easy solution to scale.
How are customer service and support?
The solution's service and technical support are excellent. I would rate them a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Many years ago, before Dell, we used a solution for file shares and office servers. We moved to storage area networks and the transition to Dell seemed like the right move.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. We did receive some assistance from Dell for the setup and they continue to assist us with maintenance on a regular basis.
What about the implementation team?
A reseller assisted us with the implementation. They were excellent. To deploy this solution, we did not require more than our existing operational staff. These three team members take care of storage and backup.
What was our ROI?
Our biggest ROI in using this solution is the ease and centralization of management. This has freed up team members to focus on other tasks in the data center.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing for this solution is reasonable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated a lot of other alternatives and this solution came out on top.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution to others.
I would rate it a ten out ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
DavidColeman from
Data storage solution that provides an easy way to manage unstructured data
What is our primary use case?
We are an integrator. The main challenges our customers want to address with this solution is the unstructured data they have coming in.
How has it helped my organization?
PowerScale is flexible in supporting various data workflows and custom applications, from legacy equipment to newer functionalities.
The solution's cyber security and ransomware protection is definitely a plus. Some of the other key benefits include performance, availability and being able to have a data lake. It offers a single repository for multiple storage types with access at multiple points.
PowerScale has the ability to scale data across our business, predominantly in an on-premises environment. We are able to scale to different segments within divisions.
This solution is able to create efficiencies in data storage and provide better control of data environments with an easy to use interface.
What is most valuable?
This has been a valuable solution for our business overall. If offers business continuity and replication features.
PowerScale helps our clients consolidate data storage and multiple applications onto a single platform for easier manageability. By doing this, overall performance is improved and data is better protected.
What needs improvement?
The legacy file system for Epsilon didn't scale into the cloud and didn't have a separate OS. It would be key if this was made possible.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used this solution for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a very stable solution and we have not experienced any outages.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for this solution is excellent.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated NetApp.
What other advice do I have?
This solution is scalable, fast and reliable. With the new NVMe technology that has been built into it and the bleeding edge of switches and NVMe, I would definitely recommend this solution.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:Partner
Date published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
James Lowey from
We can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them
What is our primary use case?
We are a nonprofit biomedical research institute. Our focus is primarily on genomics, translating discoveries in the field of genomics into treatments for patients.
It is central to our data storage of scientific data. We sequence the human genomes of folks with different diseases, primarily cancer but also other disorders, e.g., rare childhood disorders and people with mitochondrial diseases as well as neurological diseases. When you do this, it generates a lot of data. Each time that you run a whole genome sequence, you generate anywhere from four to eight terabytes of data per RAM. For example, if you are looking at 1,000 patients, that is anywhere from four to eight petabytes. Currently, we have about seven petabytes of storage being used for storing these genomes, which is a fair amount.
It is an on-prem, scale-out storage. Their nodes are linked together through a back-end interconnect.
We are running current versions of software on the node. It has versions now. The nomenclature is sometimes not the easiest to follow, because they still like to rebrand things.
How has it helped my organization?
It has given us the capability to focus on our prime objective, which is science, without having to necessarily be concerned about the back-end infrastructure that powers it. This is something we are always looking to achieve: Being able to focus on our prime mission without having technology getting in the way. Scientists don't want to learn all about your storage system. They just want to do their science.
It is kind of the critical piece for storing scientific data for our Institute. It is where we put our most valuable and precious data. We also leverage it for the less sexy work of administrative data spreadsheets, Word documents, etc. So, it is flexible. We access it via NFS and SMB. Those are the two primary methods of access that we use along with some others, such as S3 for some particular use cases.
We are going through an exercise right now of upgrading one of our clusters. We have a variety of different choices in how we want to go based upon capacity, performance, and price. It is not a bad thing to have a variety of different options available to you when you make those decisions. There are plenty of different node types and ways to deploy the solution that set a wide variety of needs. The cluster that we are looking at replacing is primarily used for administrative data and backup. Therefore, we aren't looking for performance so much as we are looking for something that is highly available, resilient, and cost-effective.
Deploying and managing storage at a petabyte scale is extremely simple. The user interface for management tasks is intuitive. The documentation is thorough and good, and if you get stuck, then the support is really good. Overall, I have confidence that we can easily deploy, manage, and maintain systems without needing a huge amount of expertise to facilitate them.
PowerScale has helped us by consolidating the data without having it dispersed. Prior to this solution, we would have many different physically separate storage solutions. To do the science, sometimes data needs to go from one place to another. Moving your data at a petabyte scale, or even at hundreds of terabytes, is very time-consuming and expensive. By having the consolidation within these clusters, it has enabled us to very easily access and compute data without having to push it around to a bunch of different places.
We have a thinly provisioned workforce. One of the crucial aspects is that we can continue to scale a solution without having to add more humans to take care of it.
What is most valuable?
There is a reason that we chose this platform to store this priceless data. We know it is resilient. It also provides data protection that helps me sleep at night.
One of the most important factors about it is you can manage a lot of storage without a lot of people. Therefore, ease of management is really important for us because we are a nonprofit. We don't have a huge IT staff to support a pretty substantial IT infrastructure. So, ease of management is always a really crucial consideration.
Another aspect of the management that is super important is having the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. We have four clusters that we manage. Having all those clusters, being able to have a single dashboard to take a look at the health of everything every morning, helps out a lot.
One of the nice things is that they have several different node types spread all the way from super high performance, flash-based storage nodes through more of what we consider an archive tier. So, we are able to use technologies, what Dell EMC has labeled SmartPools that will tier data automatically between different types of storage. So, we can ensure that hot data resides on the high-performance storage. Whereas, once data has gotten colder, then it can be pushed off to the low-performance storage to help control costs.
We have used the solution’s support for the S3 protocol, but in a limited use case. We are looking to expand that because we are doing more work towards cloud-based solutions. So, having the flexibility of S3 is important as we design new workloads that will be more cloud-centric. They will be able to use that protocol to access data on nodes without necessarily having to go back and refactor everything.
It is good and efficient when maximizing storage utilization. The operating system behind it, called OneFS, provides granularity, data protection, and control. So, you can actually adjust the amount of overhead being consumed for your data protection, depending upon what your needs are. It is pretty efficient at keeping data protected. At the end of the day, that is one of the most important things: Knowing that your data is safe.
Dell EMC keeps adding more features to the solution’s OneFS operating system. We have been iterating with them for quite some time. The solution is continually improving and becoming more robust and reliable. One of the latest things that really helped us out was the ability to perform upgrades without having cluster-wide outages, which is huge because we don't want to shut down operations unless we absolutely have to. Having that was a really big win for us. This saved us time. More importantly, it has kept our labs functioning during upgrades, as opposed to having shut down sequencers for a day while we go through and upgrade everything, which is important.
What needs improvement?
Something that still could be improved upon is adding additional node types of different sizes to facilitate a better way to run in distributed offices. For example, we have a lab up in Flagstaff, but they don't have a lot of IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is not really appropriate to run this system at their location. So, we run it down here in Phoenix. It would be nice if there was a smaller solution that we could deploy up there that was still as cost-effective as the bigger solutions.
The thing that they are working on now, and we are following closely is more native cloud integrations. The way that we envision workloads in the future is around moving compute to data instead of the other way around. So, we would like to have a single pane glass to manage storage across a variety of different platforms, including native cloud. That would be awesome.
For how long have I used the solution?
We were using the PowerScale solution before Dell EMC even bought Isilon. So, we have been using it for a lot of years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have run this product for so many years now. I can count on one hand the number of times where we have had any kind of issue that impacted availability. Usually, it turned out not to be the cluster but something else. It is extremely robust and continues to function.
We are not super aggressive in patching or anything. We believe that stability is number one. Availability is just of the most critical importance so that is really where we focus.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Once you have set up your initial cluster, adding more capacity to it is extremely easy. It is so easy that one of our salespeople added a node to the cluster. Having a salesperson do something technical is always a little bit interesting, but they didn't have any problems at all. "Boom," and it works.
This is one of the nice things that goes back to that whole ease of management. Being able to add additional capacity is pretty simple. You just buy the nodes and plug them in, as long as you have enough of the right kind of node types. However, if you meet all that criteria, it is that easy to do.
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.
I have done forklifting, and it is a drag. I don't want to do that again. We want to just keep being able to grow as we need to ensure our customers have the resources that they need to do their work.
How are customer service and support?
I have worked pretty closely with their engineers over a number of years. They have implemented several different items that we have suggested.
The technical support is excellent. They have good support teams within Dell EMC, but also the VARs that we use have b...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-12-08T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Eric Burgueño from
Simplified data management, tremendously reducing our users’ cognitive overhead
What is our primary use case?
PowerScale (formerly Isilon) is effectively a giant NAS. We have two clusters, one for production workloads and one for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity purposes. These clusters are installed in separate data-centers, physically located in two different places in the country. Both clusters were deployed at the same time when we first adopted the solution, and we have been growing them at an almost equal rate ever since.
Our production cluster is attached to our High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, and this was the primary use case in the beginning: to provide scale-out storage for the Bioinformatics team, who do omics analysis on plant and seafood organisms that we do scientific research on. As time went on, we expanded our use of the platform for other user groups in the organization.
Eventually, PowerScale became the de-facto solution for anything related to unstructured data or file-based storage. Today, we also use the platform to host users’ home directories, large media files, and really any kind of data that doesn't really fit anywhere else, such as in a SharePoint library or a structured database. Nowadays, almost everyone in the organisation is a direct or indirect user of the platform. The bulk of the storage, however, continues to be consumed by our HPC environment, and Bioinformaticians continue to be our largest users. But we also have data scientists, system modellers, chemists, and machine-learning engineers, to name a few.
Our company has multiple sites throughout the country and overseas, with the two primary data-centers supporting our Head Office and most of the smaller sites. Some of these sites, however, have a need for local storage, so our DR/BCP PowerScale cluster receives replicated data from both our production cluster as well as these other file servers.
How has it helped my organization?
Before PowerScale we used to have a different EMC product. I believe it was VNX 5000, which is primarily a block storage array with some NAS functionality. We did not have a HPC environment, however we did have a group of servers that performed approximately the same function.
Back in those days, raw storage had to be partitioned into multiple LUNs, and presented as several independent block devices because of size limitations of the storage array. When one of these devices started to run out of space, it was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming to shift data away from it, which slowed down our science. We wanted a solution that would free our users from the overhead of all of that data wrangling. Isilon was a good fit because it enabled us to effectively consolidate five separate data stores into a single filesystem, providing a single point of entry to our data for all of our users.
PowerScale helped us consolidate our former block storage into a full-fledged, scale-out, file storage platform with great success. We then decided to expand our use cases further, replacing some of the ancillary Windows File Servers that provided network file shares in our Head Office. We now have a single platform for all our unstructured data needs at our main locations.
We have not explored using PowerScale cloud-enabling features yet, but it is in our roadmap. The fact that those features exist out of the box, and can be enabled as required is another reason the platform is so versatile.
The switch to PowerScale was transformative. Before we implemented it, users had to constantly move their data between different storage platforms, which was time consuming and a high barrier of entry for getting the most of our centralized compute. Distributed, parallel processing is challenging enough, to add data wrangling on top of it created massive cognitive overload. Scientists are always under pressure to deliver on time, and deadlines are unforgiving. The easier we can make leveraging technology for them, the better.
We officially launched our current HPC environment shortly after we introduced Isilon, supporting approximately 20 users. Today, that number has grown 17500% to over 350 users across all of our sites. In an organization with nearly 1,000 employees, that's more than a third of our workforce! I credit PowerScale as one of the critical factors responsible for that growth. PowerScale simplified data management because it allows you to present the same data via multiple different protocols (eg: SMB, NFS, FTP, HTTP, etc), tremendously reducing our users’ cognitive overhead.
Before adopting PowerScale, we also faced capacity constraints in our environment. I had to constantly ask end-users to clean up and remove files they no longer needed. Our block data stores were constantly sitting at around 90% utilization. Expanding the storage array was not only expensive: every time that we wanted to provision additional space we had to decide if it was justified to re-architect the environment versus adding yet another data store. And going with the later option meant going back to our users again to free up space before more capacity could be added. All of this wasted massive amounts of time, that could have otherwise been spent running jobs and doing science.
Once we introduced scale-out storage, capacity upgrades and expansion became straightforward. The procurement process was simplified because now we can easily project when we will hit 90% storage utilization, and our users have visibility of how much storage they are individually consuming thanks to accounting-only quotas, which help keeping storage usage down. PowerScale provides a lot of metrics out of the box, which are easy to navigate and visualize using InsightIQ, and most recently DataIQ.
I can certainly recommend PowerScale for mission-critical workloads, it is a powerful but simple platform with little administration overhead. We use it in production for a variety of use cases, and it would be hard for our organization to operate effectively without it.
What is most valuable?
When we selected Isilon as our preferred storage provider, many considerations came into play, but the deciding factor was how little administration it requires. We no longer need a dedicated storage administrator looking after it. Instead, our Systems Engineers can handle the day-to-day operations without requiring in-depth expertise in storage management. The simplicity of the solution was a strong selling point when we first started looking into it. For example, when you have replicated clusters, you must ensure that you can actually failover between them in the event of a disaster. PowerScale makes setting up and checking the status of replication schedules extremely simple.
Over time, we started using more and more of its capabilities. I believe 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. Our users can now access the data they need for their research, without having to deal with multiple credentials depending on the environment they are using, or having to rely on specific clients. The same file can be opened and edited from Windows Explorer or from the Linux command line, and we can guarantee that the ownership and permissions of that file will remain consistent. It reduces friction and cognitive overhead, which is what I value the most.
Data security and availability are also included in solution, out-of-the-box. Of course you still need to be aware of how to configure the different features to your use case, but from a data security and availability perspective, you can leverage replication schedules, snapshotting, increased redundancy at rest, and all of those features which we now consider a must-have. With PowerScale, I can have piece of mind that if a specific directory needs to be protected, it will be protected.
What needs improvement?
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. You can either access a file because it can be access by anyone in the organization, or you cannot at all. There is no in-between. HTTP is not considered a first-class data access protocol, so the Unified Permission Model that would allow a user to authenticate before being able to access a private file, does not apply.
However, with the recent introduction of S3 starting from OneFS 9, I believe the necessary plumbing is already there for HTTPS to also be elevated to a first-class protocol in the future because both protocols sit behind a web server under the hood. It does not sound like it would be too complicated to implement, but it would be a valuable feature and it is currently missing.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started exploring storage solutions for our environment back in 2012. We have been using PowerScale for nearly 10 years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
PowerScale has never failed us. Since it was first installed, it has been running with almost 100% uptime since we started using it. We have only had to shut down the entire cluster once because we were moving data-centres. In earlier versions, sometimes you had to reboot the entire cluster for significant OS upgrades. Today, rolling upgrades are the norm, where only a single node is ever down at a time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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Disclaimer: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2022-02-16T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1852440 from
Helps consolidate data storage, great for SMB and NFS file exports and offers cybersecurity
What is our primary use case?
The product allows us to handle both NFS file systems along with SMB shares. It's object-oriented as well.
What is most valuable?
Our major use is for SMB and NFS file exports for the open systems area. Both are heavily used in our company.
In terms of how useful PowerScale is for helping consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform, we do use it. It's used across different platforms. We have file systems that are both NFS, so it's being shared with our open systems. However, some are also SMBs, so they can get to it from their Windows systems as well. It's very helpful for our applications.
PowerScale Cybersecurity, including its ransom protection, is very important to our organization. In fact, I've got a session coming up that I'm going to learn more about that. We had a presentation on that at my work with our technical support group.
The solution in general has allowed us to move off of multiple Windows boxes where they had huge data stores, and we migrated it to the Isilon, or PowerScale as it's now called. It's just one point of contact there. It's made it easier and more cost-effective.
PowerScale has helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities, however, it's hard to assess an exact number.
It's easy to manage; it's not that difficult. The web UI is very intuitive, and there's CLI also that you can use to manage it.
What needs improvement?
I'm happy with the product the way it is, however, I like the improvements that keep coming out with the new 1FS code upgrade.
Technical support could be improved. Whenever we have a hiccup, we'd like to get it fixed maybe quicker.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for about six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have 800 people using the solution.
In terms of increasing usage, we're not going to implement it elsewhere, however, we always have new employees coming on.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support varies depending on the person you get.
We used to have a chat feature available on the support site. It's not available to us anymore. You try to use it and it comes up saying, "No one available."
It used to be easy. You'd get on the chat and you could solve something maybe within an hour. Now, you have to open an SR and wait for somebody to get back to you.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used an EMC product, however, I don't remember what it was called. It might have been Virtual Gateway or something like that. We use that as a front end to VMAX storage. There was newer technology which was why we made the switch.
How was the initial setup?
We have the solution deployed in two locations, in our production data center, and in another disaster recovery data center. We're syncing data between the two. It's used by all our employees. That's where their personal drives are, along with corporate drives and departmental drives, that are off this storage as well.
There are three of us that maintain the solution. It's not a lot of work once it's all set up and running.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment in terms of the amount of storage that we have. There are a lot of things watching it. So it's very helpful.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not really involved with the pricing.
What other advice do I have?
Our company is a customer.
We're not using it in the cloud. We're just getting into the cloud a little bit at our business. We're heavily using it for the NFS and SMB shares.
I'm not sure whether it reduced our risk or not.
We just recently upgraded our Isilon notes to the new PowerScale notes.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
I'd advise other users that it is cost-competitive. There are other solutions out there. This has an all-flash option as well. If you need the speed without the old flash, that's available as well. However, we have hybrid models of it.
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1061193 from
Flexible and helps reduce risks with good cyber security
What is our primary use case?
The solution provides file-based access for everyone. It's a simplified platform for user-based access to files. It's also very simple to do data center replication for disaster recovery with Isilon.
How has it helped my organization?
It's hard to think back all the way to the beginning when we actually got it and it helped us improve. Of course, it's leaps and bounds over any Windows-based file share that may have existed back in the early 2000s. However, it's really helped engineers manage and maintain it. It's a very simple platform to work with.
What is most valuable?
The file-based dumping for SQL backups is great. We use that fairly heavily, especially with the flash-based nodes on the Isilon. It's been our go-to platform for user-based file access.
The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected has been great. We integrate and have Avamar-based backups with Isilon. The protection has been great.
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.
Cyber security, including ransom protection, is good. For us, we haven't really leveraged a lot of those features as we should. We know that they're there and we're working with our partners to help us implement those pieces for us.
The impact has PowerScale had on our organization's storage efficiency is positive. It's tough to say efficiency as we love using it and so we just dump everything into it. What it does retain does give us a great DD compression on the array. We find ourselves overusing it, however, we do have it plugged into Cloud IQ. That helps us with alerts to let us know when we're getting close to our thresholds for capacity.
PowerScale has helped us free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. They're not spending a lot of their time managing user files. Out there, everything's managed from the array itself.
PowerScale has helped reduce our overall risk. It has helped us reduce our overall risk mainly due to the fact that we're replicating between data centers. We don't have to worry about a single point of failure within our data center. I can check on the health of our arrays really at any time with Cloud IQ, and everybody sleeps better at night.
What needs improvement?
If they integrated some functions, as they have on Data Domain with a cyber recovery vault, it would be ideal. They have the immutable snaps that they can leverage on there, however, it would be nice to have something folded in with CyberSense that we could detect points in time when we need to do recovery for anything that may be compromised.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've had Isilon for many generations. I'd say we've used it for the last eight to ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had issues with internal load balancing between some of the shelves. That has been an ongoing issue that support is trying to address. We're still waiting on a resolution for that, but that's really been our only issue with the stack that we have.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't had any issues with technical support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In terms of what we used before, I can't remember that far back. If we did it was probably some sort of Windows-based file share that was all manual controls. It's hard to compare against what we used in the past as it's not like we switched from another vendor.
How was the initial setup?
I was not directly involved with the initial development of the solution. My involvement was just the management of the storage engineers managing the system. We like to keep everything in the Dell ecosystem so it was easy enough for us to just turn it over to the storage engineers.
It wasn't complex at all. Even on upgrades and controllers that we've done have been pretty straightforward, however, we've got two guys today that manage the environment.
It's deployed across two data centers.
The solution does require maintenance. We do continuous controller updates, and things like that, however, we do it in conjunction with support.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI, however, it's tough to compare since we haven't really looked at other platforms. It's been easier for us to use the platform we have.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is reasonable. The ease of use with the array and the functions that we get from it still seems to be better than other products that are on the market today.
What other advice do I have?
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's still great, however, there are some internal issues that need to be resolved. That said, I understand it's always under continuous development.
I would advise potential users to not focus on the price tag right away. I know there are other cheaper solutions, however, they may not have the functionality that Isilon has and the same tie-ins that you'll get with the Dell ecosystem with things like Data Domain and Avamar, et cetera.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1852437 from
Easy to expand, helps consolidate data storage, and offers great support
What is our primary use case?
It was a good fit for the system that we put in, as far as the amount of secondary data that was going to be generated on our system. Not only was it going to have the capacity for everything, but it had the scale up and scale out. We needed expansion without having to reimage the system. The larger you scale it out, the better IOP and the better bandwidth. It checked all the boxes in terms of what we really wanted to hit for a tier-two storage system.
What is most valuable?
I just heard my SME today say OneFS is actually the best feature of the whole thing. The continuum improvements that OneFS has to keep up within the industry and keep up with standards, the ease at which it can be deployed, and the ease at which it can be upgraded, all are key features of this system.
The other really good, key feature that I love is the scalability. I don't have to rebuild the cluster to add a node. It goes with being able to scale up and out without taking my system down.
PowerScale is helping consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform for easier manageability. As an example, I’d probably use the scenario of I ingest data from a partner, and then I use the capabilities within the Isilon to distribute the data across the other clusters in my enterprise. While we like to think that we're running an enterprise environment, their definition of the enterprise and my definition of an enterprise are not the same. The idea here is, that I'm able to take in data from one organization at one cluster, and then use the smart features and the other features of Isilon, one of the best operating systems, to redistribute that data to any other cluster that needs it.
The impact has PowerScale had on our company's storage efficiency has been really good. I just recently saw a report on this, a few weeks ago. We're actually doing really well as far as compression and deduplication go across. We've over-bought compared to capacity based on the deduplication and compression that we're getting out of the system right now.
We really overbought on capacity. We have sites that are only 20% used. Then again, that goes back to the de-duplication and compression we're getting out of Isilon. They should be at 45% to 50% consumption at this point. The deduplication and compression, however, are working so well. We're only using 20% of the capacity. I'll have a hard time when I go on a life cycle lease. I will have a very hard time convincing leadership that, no, I still need the capacity. When they start reading and seeing these reports, it'll create a problem for me as I’ll have to justify it. However, to be clear, it's a good problem to have.
PowerScale has helped free up our employees' time to focus on other business priorities. We were able to do things like due diligence and research on InsightIQ and DataIQ and were able to do product comparisons while not having to worry about Isilon while we're doing the product comparisons. It's freed up the cycles on those guys really well. I've got them to a point now where I'm cross-training them into Avamar, so that they actually have things to do.
PowerScale has helped reduce our overall risk in that it's dependable. The data is always going to be there. I don't have to worry about my end users. It has reduced risk across the entire enterprise.
What needs improvement?
In terms of PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection, considering the environment that we're on, I don't have to really worry about ransomware. 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. That's what I'm looking for. If Tenable had specific Isilon plugins, when they do compliance scans, that would be ideal. Right now, the only plugins being used are the BSD plugins which when they scan across an Isilon, come back with all kinds of security findings, which are false positives that my team then has to go and chase down. As far as Isilon security is concerned, it’s lovely. As far as being able to prove it, it’s not so lovely. I don't know if there's a partnership between Tenable and Dell that maybe we can bridge the gap on that one.
A recent development is, that there's a key feature coming out in OneFS 9.3, however, then when you try to get to 9.3 or 9.4 of the OneFS, it's been pulled from the download of the Dell website and we're referring back to 9.2.1 as the target code. The feature I'm looking for is in 9.3. If it's not going to be available to download, they should stop telling me about it.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution for six, going on seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is awesome. There are a few drives, every now and again, however, with the product itself, we haven't had any issues with it.
How are customer service and support?
Dell's support for PowerScale is awesome. It's probably, one of the best SEs that I've had in recent history is my PowerScale SE. If there's something I need or information that I'm looking for, I know exactly who to go to. They're really responsive. It's really cool.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This was a greenfield build. Isilon and PowerScale are what we put in from the very beginning.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved in the initial setup or deployment of this solution. My understanding is that it was pretty straightforward. We had a little bit of a rough spot when we went to do a OneFS upgrade, however, that's due to putting in hardening on them. When we had to back it off to do the upgrade, the hardening didn't back out as easily as the hardening went in. That created some snafus and we ended up undoing all the hardening across the board, which was a Dell solution for the hardening. Then, we just created our own scripts to do it and that's much easier to manage.
When we deployed, it wasn't necessarily just PowerScale. Every PowerScale install went with a complete stack, so there was the switching, there was the server-side, the VMware, and everything that went along with building a stack. The Isilons themselves only occupied about three or four days' worth of a six-week install period. It was pretty easy on a per-installation basis.
What was our ROI?
We've seen ROI in terms of time. We're also implementing the new version of vROps in which we can actually see the cost from our different applications, and how they use things.
From a time perspective, I have seen a return on investment in just the fact that I can take people now and redirect them to other products. I'm not going to reduce staff, however, I am going to redirect to other product lines. I have one guy that went from being our storage SME to probably one of my top guys, as far as VMware is concerned as well. It's worked out nicely.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is great. I'm not aware of the price point. As I was just actually telling my crew today, our job is to come up with solutions, not worry about the price. That's the management's problem to worry about the cost. If they don't like the cost, they'll come back and tell us to find another solution. Up to this point, I'd say the price point is okay.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other options. I couldn't say exactly which ones. I wasn't necessarily on the program when they did the evaluation, and therefore, I don't know what products were evaluated. That said, there was an evaluation period done.
What other advice do I have?
In terms of versions, we have a mix of X410s and H500s.
I’m not sure of the solution's flexibility for supporting various data workflows while keeping them protected. I would have to refer to my SME on that one. I don't really have feedback on that.
Speaking from a point where I don't know how much money we have invested, from a productivity, stability, and ease of management perspective, absolutely I'd 100% back it up every time. It's never provided a hiccup. Of all the components in our IT system, it's probably the least troublesome. It has been a workhorse and solid since the day we put it in.
I'd rate it eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1852572 from
Flexible, scales, and handles data growth well
What is our primary use case?
We have massive unstructured data. It's only used to keep up with our data growth.
How has it helped my organization?
Its scalability has been huge for us. Before that, we were using Windows File Servers and it was just a lot of labor-intensive log-on activities to build all those servers. With Isilon, we just add nodes and grow capacity. We realized those benefits as soon as we had it online.
What is most valuable?
We love the scalability with OneFS. It's one file system that just grows. It is able to keep up with our massive data and ingestion.
We don't use applications on the Isilon, however, for our data and structured data, it manages the growth of that.
The solution's flexibility for supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected is okay. It does the job. I didn't really think about it in terms of protection with its resiliency and its ability to grow.
For us, it's important that PowerScale helps us secure data from cyber attacks, however, budgets control everything we do, so we can only use it as far as whatever our budget allows.
What needs improvement?
We lost our technical sales reps about two years ago. We haven't gotten one assigned to us. We'd love to have a technical sales rep assigned to us.
We would like to see performance improvements and security improvements which are in all the releases. We haven't leveraged S3 yet, however, at some point we're going to leverage S3 which we're working towards the 9.0 releases. Therefore, we'd like to see some improvements in the protocols.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for five or six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
OneFS seems very stable. I just wish support would get a little better. I realize with COVID 19 it's been hard to keep people.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is why we have it. It's awesome.
There are challenges to providing economies of scale, for a large cluster, however, it's nothing. It's hard to quantify that. It's just a cluster. However, we've been pleased with the scalability overall.
How are customer service and support?
In the past year, it hasn't been as great. They seem to just follow KBS. Prior to that, they were awesome. I'm hoping they get it together.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Negative
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We just used Windows File Servers before Isilon. We didn't have any NAS to speak of. Maybe we used NetApp, however, that's not a scalable solution. We evaluated others and we chose Isilon.
How was the initial setup?
It's very straightforward. It's a little complicated setting up, however, other than that, you just allocate file shares and maintain security patches, and management is easy. It's pretty similar to other systems. It's very straightforward once it's set up.
I deployed it myself. My implementation strategy was just to do it. I have a kind of template and I just modify it for every deployment and I just rack it a certain way so that we can manage the backend cabling, which is a really big deal. I rack it, set it up, and configure it.
We have it in our major data centers, including Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix. I do all the maintenance which includes dealing with failed hard drives. There are always errors popping up. I'm just keeping ahead of all the little things that come up and engaging with support and so forth.
What about the implementation team?
I did not use an integrator reseller or consultant for the deployment. I did it myself.
What was our ROI?
We have seen an ROI. For example, we don't build Windows File Servers anymore. There's none of that labor. We do add nodes. We just have massive data growth and it helps us keep up with that. However, we have no quantitative numbers for that to share.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing seems reasonable to me. We always evaluate new storage platforms and we've stuck with Isilon.
The costs involved just purchasing the hardware licensing with it and extending maintenance. That's with every product though.
What other advice do I have?
We haven't really looked into PowerScale's cybersecurity, including its ransomware protection.
We have some Gen 5 and Gen 6 nodes. We have five clusters, now. We just purchased the newer Gen 6, A3000, and H700 nodes in our Phoenix data center. We have quite a range of hardware.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If there was better support I'd give it ten out of ten.
It's an awesome product. I'd advise others to evaluate all the products and just pick the one that's best for them.
Things are in the details and I've always paid attention to that, however, you have got to handle deployment carefully and think ahead to what could go wrong. If you do that, everything will be fine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-18T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Jin Park from
High volume storage solution that is flexible in supporting multiple applications
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution to manage large data sets. It makes it easy for us to consolidate data storage and multiple applications into a single platform for easier manageability. It means we only need to manage a minimal number of clusters.
The solution is very flexible in supporting various data workloads while keeping them protected. It scales well with different performance node types. In terms of data protection, it replicates easily with the replication features of sync IQ.
We have multiple clusters across two data centers and have two two main teams; our enterprise storage services, and our HPC who recently purchased a bunch of capacity from Iceland.
When it comes to Powerscale Cybersecurity and ransomware protection, we use a third party solution called Superna. It is still important to us that Powerscale helps secure our data from cyber attacks. An attack can happen very quickly and be very damaging. Large data sets are difficult to protect, replicate and recover.
How has it helped my organization?
Using this solution, provisioning is a lot easier because we have large capacity clusters and can easily provide storage space to users as needed.We realized the benefits of this solution shortly after deployment. The management of the solution is very easy.
This solution has had a positive effect on our company's storage efficiency. We are able to add capacity as needed in order to scale.
What is most valuable?
The ease of use of this solution has been the most valuable aspect as well as the Sync IQ and snapshot features.
It assists with eliminating storage silos because it provides SMB and NFS protocols. Powerscale has also helped free up our employee's time to focus on other business priorities.
What needs improvement?
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.
Version upgrades and patches take a long time to complete. This could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for twelve years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a scalable solution from a file data perspective in the core. At the edge, scalability is more difficult because you need three nodes minimum to start a cluster. You need a lot of other hardware to provide that service. This solution is not scalable in the cloud.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the support for this solution a seven out of ten. The quality of support depends on the agent you deal with.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used other solutions but Iceland is the storage platform of choice for the large data sets that we have. We have a very strong relationship with Dell EMC and their support is very good so we were very comfortable choosing Iceland.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. Dell came in to install the solution and update the operating systems. After that, some administration and management tasks needed to be complete and then the setup was complete.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing for this solution is reasonable.
What other advice do I have?
This solution scales very easily. You just need to be aware of how much you scale as this can complicate the management of the solution. Scaling requires a strategy.
Powerscale is easy to manage but more difficult to maintain. This is because it is a multiple node environment and the larger you get, the longer it takes. There are more risks when you make a change.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2022-05-08T00:00:00-04:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Gene Uhl from
Handles data distribution among the nodes internally, making management easy
What is our primary use case?
We are using it for storage of video files, with casual access to them. We needed as much storage as we could get for the best price. If you are looking for a hybrid type of situation, when you want low latency for transactional things, and higher-latency storage for archival things, you can get the hybrid nodes.
Each of our two clusters has the same disk sizes, etc. We did that for interchangeability, in case we wanted to move shelves between the clusters. They act independently, but they replicate between the two. We love the system. That's why we continue to upgrade and buy it.
What is most valuable?
The low latency, the high-capacity connections that we have with the nodes, and the ability to add as needed to a particular system, are all important features for us.
It also handles data distribution among the nodes internally. You really don't have to do anything, so management is easy. If you're someone who really wants to get granular and know where every bit or byte is going, maybe it's not for you because I don't know if you can get that granular.
We have over a petabyte of storage and we've sliced it up. You can't really call them "shares" because it's not really like an NFS mount or CIFS share. But we've sliced it up and the policies and auditing on a particular system are, in fact, too much data. Anytime a file change or any system change happens on it, it records it and we ingest that into a SIEM. We can crunch it so we know who is changing what file at what time. That gives us auditing capabilities.
The policy-based management that we have, for who accesses what shares, is relatively simple to set up and manage. It's almost like managing an Active Directory file share.
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 OneFS file system is very simple and has an astronomical number of features that allow us to get very granular with permissions, policies, and archiving of data. It handles everything for you. It's one of the easiest storage solutions that we've ever implemented in the 12 years I've been working in this organization.
I also love the snapshot functionality. It's pretty much what everyone does in backup. It's a backup of your system, but it lets you set the frequency of the snapshots. That's very important to us because we take so many snapshots. That means we can recover up to six months back, if somebody makes a file change or deletes a file. It's like a versioning type of function. It probably isn't really special. A lot of backup software has it. But the snapshot functionality is what we utilize the most within the OneFS file system. In theory, you don't really have to back up your systems if you're taking snapshots.
What needs improvement?
The only problem with the WORM (write once, read many) feature is it does take up more space than if you just wrote a file, because it writes stuff twice. But it works for us for chain-of-custody scenarios, and it's built into the file system itself.
Also, on the PowerScale system, 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. It's the secret sauce of protecting your data and that makes it a little disconcerting for someone who is used to seeing if a directory is using 5 MB of space. So if you have a directory using a terabyte of space, it might be using a little bit more because of the way that the system handles data protection. That is something you have to get used to.
Also, a lot of people are not used to the tagging or the description in the InsightIQ application. We're used to using the normal nomenclature of terabyte, petabyte, etc. They utilize TB byte and PB byte. So you have to understand the difference when InsightIQ is telling you how much storage you have. It's different than what we're used to. It uses base-2 and the world is used to base-10. Discerning how much storage you actually have, from the information in InsightIQ, takes a little bit of math, but it's not very difficult. I wish they had an interface in there where you could click and it would report in the way the industry is used to, which is in terabytes and petabytes. It's nothing major, just something you have to get used to when you're looking at it.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have two clusters. We purchased our first cluster about seven or eight years ago. We've refreshed that particular cluster, where we traded in the old one and brought a whole new cluster. In the midst of that purchase, we also bought a second cluster where we replicate some files between the two. We just refreshed and upgraded that second cluster, which was probably about five or six years old, and bought a whole new set of A200 nodes for it, so the shelf sizes are the same.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've had some bumps and bruises when buying new nodes and adding them to the cluster, but I don't think it was the technology that we really had the problems with. It was, unfortunately, Dell EMC support, where we got a couple of Dell EMC engineers who weren't as familiar with the system as we'd like. Once we kicked it up the chain, and we had an engineer that was more versed, they fixed the problem relatively fast.
When we had the first iteration of PowerScale seven years ago, we added nodes to that. This was how that process went: The node came in, it was already populated with drives, you slapped it in, put it into the rack, cabled it up to the networking, and put the networking on the same VLAN, the network backend configuration. Then, you went into the configuration manager, the OneFS file system and you told it about the node. You said, "I have a node that I want to join to the cluster." It brought the cluster in and, for lack of a better term, formatted it, added it to the array, and it was there. The amount of time it took to cable up and join that node was about two hours. Once it's there, the storage just expands.
In theory, and what we expected with the newer systems when adding nodes—and this is the way it does work, once they figured out the problem that they were having—was that it would be the same scenario. You rack the system. If you get the networking done right, which is really easy—you just drop it on—it handles a lot of the internal networking within the cluster itself, but you need to put it on the same external VLAN. If you do that right, the OneFS file system just finds it. You add it, and it just assimilates it into the cluster. Once the networking is done, it should take under an hour for it to get assimilated into the node and for the storage to become available.
Most of the problems we had were when we were adding on. We really haven't had any problems after it was up and running. When it's up and running, it's rock-solid. We never really get failures other than drives failing, because all SATA drives fail. But you just pull out a drive and you slap another one in.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We were using it for video storage and we were pretty impressed with its scale-up and scale-out abilities. We are always looking at the ability of a platform for scaling up and scaling out, especially because it's file storage. This was the best thing on the block that was out there.
How are customer service and technical support?
In recent months, their backend technical support has waned a little bit. They need to address the first-line technical support. I used to have a lot of confidence in Dell EMC technical support, but since COVID—and maybe it's the COVID situation—the technical support has fallen short a little bit. We've run into some problems with them.
They stand behind their product. The support that I get from my support group and my enterprise management team is phenomenal. When there's a problem, they address it. It may take them a little bit of time, but they own up to it.
But calling in and getting that first-line technical support needs to be addressed. It's been a little bit of a "hunt and peck" when you have issues, as opposed to just coming up with the actual solution to a problem. That's only been the case in about the last nine months or a year. I continue with Dell EMC because when there's an issue, they back it up and they make it right.
How was the initial setup?
It's one of the easiest things to configure. It's pretty much set-it-and-forget-it.
Initially, because in the first system that we had seven years ago the drive space was so small—I think they were 4 TB drives—there were a lot of shelves. We had over a petabyte of storage, so it was a lot of shelves. The installation, physically, was what took a really long time.
Now, the drive size is much bigger and the density per shelf is much greater. The actual s...
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2021-01-11T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Maurizio Davini from
Our storage I/O performance is three times what we had before
What is our primary use case?
We are using Dell EMC PowerScale as a central storage for our virtual HPC infrastructure based on VMware.
We have several silos today, as our HPC infrastructure is typically divided between bare-metal and virtual configurations. The storage that we use on various infrastructures is different, as we are typically using a storage style that is different from any production facility. Until now the request from our internal users was to keep the data separated in different storage silos, and converging in central storage facility while on the virtual HPC is the new request. Therefore, we are experimenting how it works.
We have five nodes of F200s.
How has it helped my organization?
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. Our administrators and people are very happy with the platform.
Now, our storage I/O performance is three times what we had before, even if we had not optimized the networking that is hosting the infrastructure. For this reason, our internal users are very happy.
What is most valuable?
We know how to deal with the OneFS system very well.
It is easy to use and scale. It is probably the easiest, most scalable storage that we have ever used with our infrastructure. It improves the performance of our infrastructure. We have some other types of storage, but they are not as simple to use like PowerScale.
The ease of use and installation have cut the time of putting a new storage solution into production. This has been very useful for us.
What needs improvement?
Some improvements to the NFS support would be of interest to us. I think that will be available next year.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using it for less than a year. We just bought the platform in May, then we did a couple of months of testing. Now, it is in production. We bought the solution as soon as it was announced, but you have to take into account the time of the delivery and testing. With the pandemic, everything is unfortunately slower.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of PowerScale is incredible. It's not so different from Isilon. PowerScale is a sort of Isilon on steroids. It has the same scalability and reliability of the Isilon platform, but now you have a lot of performance, so it is a sort of super Isilon from a customer usage point of view.
In the year that we have had it in production, the solution has demonstrated stability and performance. It is something that we rely on for our simulation infrastructure.
There is a team of three who maintain all the infrastructure for PoweScale. It is easy to manage as soon as you have it setup.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It scales seamlessly. We started three nodes, then we added two and there were no problems. The impressive part: Now creating or expanding a PowerScale cluster is almost immediate. In the past, you needed more time.
As of today, we have around 15 research groups doing work on the platform, but we have only started the production phase after weeks of testing.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is perfect. We are more than satisfied. They are responsive with good turnaround times.
We have several Dell EMC solutions. We are familiar with their support and are more than happy with it.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
For NFS and CIFS services, we used Isilon and now PowerScale. We have lengthy Isilon experience in our data center. Today, we have still a Dell EMC Isilon H600 hybrid in production, but we decide to go to PowerScale to host our simulation facility. Typically, the workloads in which we are hosting on our virtual HPC environment come from engineering and chemical simulations as well as the latest AI and deep learning workloads.
We were beta testers from the first platform of Isilon before it was acquired by Dell EMC. Its scalability, ease of use, and performance were key. When PowerScale came out, we didn't try to buy another platform for this kind of work.
We have been very satisfied with our Isilon experience as a centralized system for HPC. PowerScale is much better than the Isilon that we had before.
How was the initial setup?
The platform is really straightforward to install and use, so we are not losing too much time setting up the storage as is and have more time to deal with the data on it.
The initial deployment took one day to set up. You do have to do some preparation for the setup, especially on the networking side. However, on the infrastructure, the platform is easy and straightforward to set up. The preparation was to prepare the networking, where you will be connecting the machines, such as, the typical networking configuration and VLANS, then you are ready to go.
It is immediate to add a new node and put that inside your configured cluster, e.g., when we installed the new PowerScale, the installation of the operating system was very quick. It was really unbelievable. We came from the first generation of Isilon where the installation of the operating system was not so fast. The F200 skyrockets onto the OneFS. Though, if we could afforded the F600, then that would be also faster. However, what we can afford is the F200, and we are happy now with that.
We have seen an improvement of performance without losing too much time when setting up the new platform.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation ourselves with the help of the Dell EMC support team, who set up the system. One person, myself, took a half a day to set up the infrastructure and another day to install it, then putting the platform in production.
Our infrastructure is directly managed by us.
What was our ROI?
We have improved the performance and reliability of our HPC storage. We are very happy with it. Our systems are typically used for research. The added value is in the performance. Typically, it's not a problem saving money. It is more a problem of how much research you are able to do, how many jobs you're able to afford, and so on. In this sense, PowerScale, in our infrastructure, is really a winning piece. Today, we have three times the performance on the I/O. The gain that we have with the I/O is significant.
Isilon was an incredible return on investment. I think PowerScale will be the same because it's giving us the performance that we were looking for at an affordable price.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The platform is not cheap. However, on the software side, you can choose what you want license. So, you can start your licensing with the features that you need, then after buying the platform add some other features.
We went for the traditional NFS and CIFS platform. We have also licensed the HDFS platform because we want to do something with the HDFS.
There are some new features, but we are not using all the features because you need licensing for all them. However, we are seeing that the platform is growing. At the end of the day, when we will need some more features, we will license some more of those features, knowing that they will have them.
The F600 machine of PowerScale is much better than what we have. It has MDM drives and 100 GB connection with the same software.
I know that you can license also some enterprise class features on the platform, but we are not using those features today.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have a small team who analyzed the market, but it is difficult to find some competition for PowerScale with the same performance and price. Something that was important during our decision was you have to teach a technician the new platform, and maybe that takes time. In this case, the integration of the PowerScale was almost seamless for the infrastructure and internal technicians.
Apart from Isilon, we are using DDN. We also have some parallel side systems that we are using production with our HPC. However, PowerScale is really the easiest to use.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend going for this solution.
PowerScale is already at the edge of the technology. If you give a look at what you find on the market today from the technology point of view, PowerScale hardware and software are at the top.
80 percent of our operations are brands, especially for HPC, but our organization is moving to the cloud from some services.
We have discussed with Dell EMC their roadmap of the platform and are very interested in it. We hope we will be able to afford the new features that will come up, like the NVMe nodes.
We have some projects using the S3 protocol, but not on PowerScale. They are on the old Isilon for HDFS.
We use the CloudIQ feature to monitor performance and other data remotely. We have two platforms on the CloudIQ: PowerScale and PowerStore. We haven't use the platform yet so much that it has been useful. We have typically been users of InsightIQ software to monitor infrastructure. Now, we are using the CloudIQ, but do not much experience.
We are not thinking about using it as an enterprise platform. However, we do see increasing our usage over time.
I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
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Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2020-11-30T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Bill Sharp from
Everything is consolidated, simplifying management and decreasing time spent administering the system
What is our primary use case?
We’re the world-leaders in webcam technology, content, and services. We do high-resolution imaging from cameras. We have millions of camera images a month coming into our network from our systems in the field. We store all of that image data, and then we edit those images into time-lapse movies.
How has it helped my organization?
We've had an 82 percent reduction in our systems administration resources.
One of the things we have also noticed is about a 20 percent reduction in our video processing time. Our video editors are able to work on editing natively, on the system, and that cuts down on a lot of time that was required to move data around. It helps their workflow.
It's also giving us double the capacity in less space. We get about 26 times greater density, compared to our previous storage systems.
In addition, Dell EMC keeps adding new features and improving on existing ones. When upgrading from the old generation, the redundancy was restructured with the domains and different node schemes, giving us more fault tolerance.
In terms of flexibility, we have two different types of nodes, and we're able to change the performance on directories, depending on the usage. It allows us to manage the entire system without having to worry about specific LUNs. It literally takes me just a few minutes to configure something and apply it.
As we expand and have to add new things to our product line, we're able to scale very well, because we have visibility on our storage, our capacity, and our needs. It has definitely helped us from a business standpoint in that we don't have to be concerned about our storage environment. We always know where we stand.
PowerScale has also helped us to eliminate data silos. Everything is consolidated and, as a result, it has simplified how we manage things and how much time we spend administering the system. With all our data in one place, we don't have to manage different types of storage systems. Everything is just a single brand. We do have different nodes, but they all get administered the same way, so we don't have to relearn different things, such as how to manage the RAIDs, RAID groups, and different protocols.
The solution has definitely freed up a lot of time. We used to spend a lot of time on our previous system. PowerScale allows us to focus on data management rather than storage management and helps us get the most out of our data.
What is most valuable?
The most important things for us are the reliability and the ability to cut down on our system administration resources. It's very easy to manage, and we have very good visibility on how the storage system is being utilized. In addition to the reliability, it's very easy to work with and it's very fast. Its sustained throughput is probably 100 times faster than previous systems.
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.
In addition, managing storage at the petabyte scale is very easy if you go through the user interface. Everything is there. But if we want to do more complex things, we can use the CLI. Since we're very familiar with Unix/Linux CLI we feel comfortable making configurations changes through there.
Another thing we particularly like is the documentation available, and how you can self-troubleshoot a lot of things. I like to know why something does not work and Dell EMC provides extensive documentation with technical details of bugs or technical shortcomings.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using PowerScale for over five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have five nines of uptime, 99.999. We have almost no downtime with the system.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is great. You plug in a new node and data starts migrating over to spread 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.
The fact that we could start with a few nodes and scale very large was one of the great things with this solution. With the other systems you could add "Bricks"—that's what they call them—but you had to set up LUNs, and we spent too much time managing that part of the system. Here, you just add it in and everything just scales up. Being able to add new nodes and increase the storage without having to redo the storage pool is great. That's one of the reasons we went with PowerScale. That was definitely a big selling point.
We're relying on it completely. I don't know if there's anything that we're not using it for. We're using it in production at full capacity.
We’re confident about the solution's ability to meet unpredictable future storage needs. I don't think there's been anything that we've needed so far that they haven't been able to accommodate. We're planning on staying with the platform for the future.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've used their technical support a few times when I had certain random issues. Sometimes the issue was Windows-related. Even when they were not able to give me an answer immediately, three hours later, after researching things, they got back to me with the correct answer and technical details on why the issue was happening. To me, that's great. That's something our previous vendor wasn't doing.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've been with the company for 20 years, and we have had various enterprise-level storage systems over those years, but the immediate predecessor was Pillar Data Systems. The primary reason we switched to PowerScale was its ability to handle the types of data that we manage. We have over a billion very small—one-megabyte to 24-megabyte files—that we are writing to the system continuously. It's an archival storage process and PowerScale was very suited for that type of environment.
What we needed was to simplify our entire system: to have higher throughput, more redundancy, and the ability to scale without having to recreate different storage pools or LUNs, like we were used to doing.
We went with PowerScale for the reliability, the scalability, and the ease of management.
How was the initial setup?
We had a lot of practice with the simulator, so once we actually had the hardware and the real system in here, we were already familiar with how to manage and do a lot of the configuration. That's something that is not available with other vendors or other systems.
Moving from the old storage, which was from another vendor, was a significant bottleneck and took months.
Upgrading from the older generation Isilon was seamless. We just plugged in the new generation nodes and told the OS to evacuate the data from the old nodes and the data migrated without downtime.
In terms of users of the system, on the management side it's our systems administration teams, so there are a handful of people involved. The people actually using the storage are our customers and our internal teams.
What about the implementation team?
Techs from EMC came over and helped us with the physical implementation, while a remote team helped us with configuration and data migration. Our experience with them was good.
What other advice do I have?
We would highly recommend PowerScale. We've been very happy with our overall experience.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclaimer: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Date published: 2020-11-23T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
reviewer1214889 from
Powerful scalability, easy to manage, and very good stability
What is our primary use case?
The solution is primarily used by companies with extremely large file systems to manage. They typically have one or two petabytes of files and usually a lot of videos as well.
What is most valuable?
The solution is extremely easy to manage. This is its most valuable feature.
What needs improvement?
The solution isn't suitable for small environments or small customers.
The price point would be too high for companies that don't need a very large amount of storage space.
The redundancy is a little bit expensive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution can scale well. It has an automatic tiering system. You can have 60 petabytes of storage. The solution offers very powerful scaling.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not complex. However, if you're not dealing with it regularly, it could be complex. It has a moderate amount of difficulty.
Deployment takes about two weeks and you need two people to handle it.
What other advice do I have?
We use the on-premises deployment model.
The solution is very good for file management, but not for other things.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Date published: 2019-11-13T00:00:00-05:00
Rated 5 out of
5 by
Rachel Bauer from
Simplified our storage and enabled our IT team to move from an operational focus to an optimization focus
What is our primary use case?
Our motivation for investing in PowerScale was to provide scalable, redundant, and reliable storage for our film production pipelines. We're an animation film studio and our live data sits on it. Firstly, we were up to our capacity. We're a growing startup and we need to be able to scale into the future. The second reason we went with it is that we've got a relatively small IT team, so we needed equipment that's reliable and easy to manage.
How has it helped my organization?
It's really set-and-forget. We went from our IT team from managing data, moving data, and deleting data on a day-to-day basis, over the course of six months to the point where, for the last 12 months, they have not had to touch it. It's really reliable, and the reporting heads off any issues that you might have.
In terms of the performance improvement, we've described it as moving from a single lane highway into a multi-lane freeway. We've still got speed limits in the individual end-user environment, but now more people can move at the same time without it throttling our system. One result is that on a local test we went from 61,000 milliseconds down to 5,500 on the PowerScale, which is a massive improvement. We have been able to leverage the features of the PowerScale to optimize that down, and that was while the pandemic was on, and we were moving from 100 percent on-premises, to 100 percent off-premises.
It has made a massive difference to how our IT team's time is utilized. It has pretty much been able to move from an operational focus, day-to-day, just keeping systems up in the environment, to now having an optimization mindset where they're looking to add new features to our production pipeline. They've got the time now to do that, whereas managing our storage before was a full-time job for them. It has saved me from having to hire one person over the last six months, and our IT team has gotten about 40 percent of its time back. It's a massive difference. We still have the same number of administrators as we had before, but it has allowed them to move from an operational focus to an optimization focus.
Before, we had disparate storage systems that we were managing separately, and now all our production storage sits within the one environment.
PowerScale allows us to manage storage without managing RAID groups or migrating volumes between controllers. It has really simplified things. We're not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That takes care of itself. We just worry about the data. It's really easy for deploying and managing storage at the petabyte scale.
It also provides the flexibility to add the right tier of storage at the right time for data that resides at the edge, core, or cloud and that is one of the reasons we chose the solution. We haven't leveraged that as yet, we're not at that point, but we definitely invested in this asset for that reason. Currently, we can build two concurrent projects, but we expect, by leveraging that technology, that we will be able to get to six concurrent projects, which will have a huge business impact.
Another benefit is that it has allowed us to better understand our storage usage and cost over a project's duration, and that's helping us to better plan and quote for future productions.
What is most valuable?
We have started to leverage the data from InsightIQ to be informed when quoting for future productions, and we're getting a better understanding of our usage and costs over a project duration.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've had Dell EMC PowerScale for 12 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any issues at all. In fact, every day we say, "Oh my God, this is so amazing."
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't added a node to the solution yet. We plan on putting in A200s, as we move between productions in our franchise. It's a new product for our team, so we're still trying to optimize what we already have. We haven't really looked to use any of their new features.
We haven't scaled the solution yet, but the reason that we could convince the board to allow us to invest in this technology was the scalability. One of the next challenges that we're going to have is how to store our historical project data. We need a solution that is going to be cost-effective, yet the data will still have to be readily accessible to our current production pipeline. The PowerScale and file pool policies will enable us to utilize the archiving, so that will likely be the next way we scale.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have found the post-installation support to be absolutely fantastic. They have helped us leverage the advanced features and that has hugely improved the performance of our custom applications that we have hosted on the PowerScale. Their tech support is great.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We didn't have a previous solution. We knew we needed a solution because every four to six weeks we were buying a new storage system. We had to make a decision on what to invest in. We reached out to our IT provider, Davichi, and they introduced us to the Dell EMC PowerScale. When we read up on it, it seemed to meet all our needs.
As a startup, we needed a technology that we could scale with. Secondly, we've got a small IT team, so the equipment needed to be reliable, easy to use, and there had to be additional support available when we needed it. We were also looking for additional features and options that we could leverage, like cross-platform support for SMB and NFS, because we were after a high-speed server and workstation access, because that was one of our pain points.
How was the initial setup?
Dell EMC were incredibly attentive through the deployment process. They met us on site and they took the time to understand our current environment, our current challenges, and they worked with us to make sure that we bought the licenses that were going to meet our needs for today. They also helped us plan for the licensing that we'll need into the future.
They met with our tech team and spent a day with us mapping out what our requirements were, looking at our environment, and making sure that we had the right networking, so that our foundation was right when we put it in. They physically installed the equipment and they continued to work with us over the next two weeks, just to make sure that everything was right. We put the PowerScale in when we were in production, at the end of a film, and we had no downtime at all. That was a massive concern for us, doing it while we were live in production, but they helped us move all the data across to the new system and we had no downtime.
We have a local IT company that introduced us to Dell EMC and this product, and they were also a part of that scoping session. They're called Davichi Computer Services, and they're amazing. We ring if we have a problem, and within a few hours someone's out there. If they can't solve it over the phone or can't remote-in, they'll come on site and help us solve the problem. Fortunately, since we put this gear in, we haven't had many issues. But even as we were learning to understand this gear they worked hand-in-hand with our IT team.
On our side, the deployment required one person, our IT manager. Everyone uses it, as an end-user, in our organization because all the data for our film production pipeline lives on it.
What was our ROI?
The total cost of ownership has been definitely worthwhile, hands-down. I had forecast the need to hire another administrator for our tech team and I haven't needed to do that.
In addition, our IT team is now concentrating on things that help our business grow and help our business make money and help our team achieve a better end product; things we couldn't have done if we'd invested in other products.
In addition to the standard fees, we had to buy switches. In the scoping sessions, when Dell EMC came on site, we identified what the capacity was in our server room to put the product in. The only thing that we didn't scope for was that we needed an additional UPS because the UPS that we had couldn't hold the load.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The only drawback for us is that it's a large upfront investment. This was a huge decision for a startup company to make. It took a bit for us to get over the line on it, but we have not regretted it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at another Dell EMC solution. The reasons we went with PowerScale were the simplicity of managing it, the faster write performance than RAID systems, the data access optimization features, and, of course, it's fully redundant, with high performance, and it's scalable.
What other advice do I have?
Make sure you take the time to understand your current environment and what additional infrastructure you might need to support the device. All that planning made it a seamless implementation for us. Sometimes that part of the process felt like it was taking forever, but it ended up being well worthwhile.
It's allowed us to consolidate everything in one, large, redundant volume, but we expected that. Nothing has gone wrong. Everything's been exactly what we expected, which is wonderful.
I imagine that as time goes it will become more valuable, particularly as we get into a world whe...
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Date published: 2021-03-24T00:00:00-04:00