Arcserve OneXafe vs. Dell PowerScale

For SMB file storage Exablox is great, but as an ESXi datastore it still needs work.

Incentivized

EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS is well suited for larger files (greater the 128 Kb) and where you need to have everything in one common name space. Where it is less appropriate is for many small files (millions of files less than 128 Kb in size) - this causes the protection level to becoming mirroring, which will cost more space.

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• Exablox is simple to setup and relatively easy to use.
• Exablox is priced very competitively and is a good value for the cost.
• Exablox has good customer service.

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• NAS Storage
• Capacity and Performance details of the array
• Alert and Operations details

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• Exablox is still in its infancy as a company and in some respects the product feels like a version 1.0.
• Integration with VMware ESXi has some bugs that need to be figured out.

Incentivized

• Some upgrades require the entire cluster to be rebooted simultaneously. In this day and age, that should not be necessary. This is my biggest disappointment with Isilon to date.
• When using multiple storage pools you have to be very careful with your capacity management. Filling up one pool can cause an overflow of data to a pool that is less performance driven. Do not underestimate your capacities or you will find yourself in a tight spot.
• Block size is almost always an issue with Isilon. It does not handle all types of data well. In many cases PACS and VNA data is best to be stored on a different storage platform that will utilize the capacity more efficiently that Isilon is capable of.
• Deduplication seems to be less efficient on Isilon than on other platforms for similar types of data.

Incentivized

The price for Exablox was very appealing. If we can resolve the NFS datastore issues we are seeing in VMware, this is a perfect solution for a ESXi datastore. Once that issue is resolved, I will give Exablox a higher rating.

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Again, the initial install, setup and config was simple through a web browser.

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Since the day we installed Exablox we have not had any down-time. The storage resources have been available 100% of the time.

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SMB file access has been very responsive. We have not seen any slowness. Also, in using Exablox as tier 1 storage in our VMware environment, the VMs performed great. No slowness issues.

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Exablox has been very responsive to our requests. They communicate very well and are extremely knowledgable

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Straightforward and simple implementation. We completed the implementation in less than 2 hours.

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Exablox was much less expensive than other storage arrays and I think there are a lot of reasons to purchase them. I believe that as the product matures, it will be a great option for storage.

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Raw disk space vs. logical disk space ratio was significantly better on the Isilon. Fast cache using SSD drives for faster searching is available on the Isilon but not available on the Overland solution. Isilon solution included faster backend switching between nodes.

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We have not tried to scale Exablox so we are not familiar with this.

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• We purchased Exablox specifically for our ESXi environment, so we are hoping to get the wrinkles worked out to see a greater return on our investment.

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• Isilon provides very high value for money
• Matches the performance and storage requirements of the arrays
• EMC provides very skillful and high response team in case of any issues in isilon

Incentivized