Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell PowerScale

Dell Compellent has a decent portfolio of products for varying sizes of business. Their licensing model is suited for those not wanting total a la carte fare, and administration is intuitive as compared to other storage arrays. This combined with Co-Pilot support gives Dell a good presence in a vast number of scenarios where networked storage is required over a DAS solution. It's only fallback is its own NAS solution, which itself may be better suited to smaller environments

Incentivized

This is one of the fastest storage array in the world and its support the maximum system. EMC PowerMax NVMe flash drive has 25 percent better response time. This storage is well suited for large scale database and application where need more storage capacity and high data I/O performance to run smooth.

Incentivized

It is well suited for scale out NAS storage. One can use Rest API calls to get relevant data. It can be used in the product SRM, where one can discover arrays from Isilon/PowerScale and can monitor the reports. One can monitor Capacity and Performance reports of the array.

Incentivized

• Block level RAID with data tiered based on how often those blocks are read or written.
• You can mix and match different ways of accessing the SAN, FC or ISCSI.
• They offer the ability to mix and match drive speeds and sizes within racks. This provides for larger, slower drives to store old data, while providing fast SSD storage for data that is constantly in use.

Incentivized

• Fastest storage array in the world.
• this system provide the performance density up to 7.5 million IOPS5 per rack
• Its support maximum system

Incentivized

• Auto data balancing between nodes while still maintaining great performance
• Directory snapshots
• Universal namespace
• Network load balancing across nodes

Incentivized

• Reliability. We had several times where VMFS luns would become corrupted and we'd have to move all VM's off to other storage
• Performance. 1g iSCSI performance was abysmal (although the unit we used was an older device)
• Management and Monitoring. Both management and monitoring are pretty primitive. We were never able to integrate monitoring into Nagios.

Incentivized

• Can be complex if someone is not versed on the product.
• Expensive.
• High cost of maintenance.

Incentivized

• In my experience, I have seen a lot of bugs in the oneFS and for remedying it, we need to install patches which requires a node reboot.
• In old isilon OneFS versions, the nodes need to be rebooted every 250 days which is quite less compared to other storage devices.
• The operational cost of Isilon is a bit on the higher side.

Incentivized

This is not solely based on the support engineers themselves but more so that the logging and gotcha's that their array has. There have been multiple times where logs are pulled, but the folder is not large enough, and it crashes the array. Other times there are certain aspects that support either does not know of or isn't knowledgable about how to look at particular issues that could be causing problems.

Incentivized

I have used Dell EMC Unity XT and I will say that the SC Series is better in the areas of the scalability is excellent. If I need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself. In addition, I like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources.

Incentivized

Stacks up very well. In storage bake off's, evaluating these products as a whole, PowerMax normally outpaces the vast majority.

Incentivized

Isilon is immensely more scalable than Celerra and gave us better control over snapshots and replication. The addition of global deduplication provides a huge space savings benefit as well.

Incentivized

• This storage array is a middle-range array that brings speed with peace of mind due to the stability.
• The uptime has helped us with making sure the hosts and servers that connect to this array have as much uptime as possible.
• The negative still has to be that these arrays can't seem to handle quick/high I/O usage.

Incentivized

• Cost
• Opex vs Capex
• Maintenance Costs.
• Learning curve on software to maintain the array.

Incentivized

• We are currently researching other vendors for our Medical imaging archives due to issues with space utilization efficiency on Isilon.

Incentivized