Dell EMC PowerScale (EMC Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage

Likelihood to Recommend

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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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 1001-5000 employees

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It is absolutely, hands down the best storage solution for Open Stack. I would even argue it is the only solution if a company is operating at petabyte scale and need resiliency. The storage solution allows any organization to scale their environment using commodity hardware from top to bottom. It has a battle tested track record where it is even being used as the data storage back end for the Large Hadron Collider at Cern

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Colby Shores

DevOps Engineer

Voice Media GroupMarketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees

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Pros

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

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Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Breaking down storage units into manageable clusters.
Enhancing data protection.

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Gerald Wilson

Software Engineer

PlainID - The Authorization CompanyComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Cons

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.

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Kevin Blackburn

Storage Engineer

Northeast Georgia Health SystemHospital & Health Care, 5001-10,000 employees

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Deployment of Ceph cluster through the Management Console might fail in some cases; better error reporting would be a good improvement there.
The Management Console should provide more options for configuring the Ceph cluster in detail.
There should be a mechanism for distributing ceph.conf to all nodes.

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Valentin Höbel

Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure

open *i GmbHInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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Alternatives Considered

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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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Red Hat Ceph storage is most comparable with VMware Virtual SAN which we currently use in production. It had about the same default resiliency although we had far more customization options with Ceph albeit more difficult to configure. VMware Virtual SAN is such an expensive item that it was worth it for us to explore Ceph as an alternative. Both had similar cons of being best mated with their preferred hypervisors (Open Stack as opposed to VMware ESXi) and neither had NFS access. Netapp was less performant than our Ceph cluster with cache tiering and far more proprietary however it does have NFS support which is crucial when being used as a storage back end for VMWare. We found our Netapp to be far less resilient as well as it does require regular maintenance.We found for our medium sized business that the Nutanix had the upgradability, NFS support, and performance and much of the resiliency of Ceph so we decided to go in that direction. If our company where operating at petabyte scale however, Ceph is hands down the best solution available!

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Colby Shores

DevOps Engineer

Voice Media GroupMarketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

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

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Vishal Ranjan Srivastav

Senior Storage Administrator

Larson and Tourbo InfotechMedia Production, 5001-10,000 employees

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Ceph allows my customer to scale out very fast.
Ceph allows distributing storage objects through multiple server rooms.
Ceph is fault-taulerant, meaning the customer can lose a server room and would still be able to access the storage.

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Valentin Höbel

Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure

open *i GmbHInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Dell EMC PowerScale (EMC Isilon) vs Red Hat Ceph Storage