Dell PowerScale vs. Red Hat Virtualization (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

RHEV is well suited for organizations that need a cost-effective and flexible solution for their environment. As its vendor-independent software, easily install on any type of hardware. RHEV provides a GUI interface to manage the software, which makes the management of the software easier for the end-user. RHEV is best for non-production or less critical applications. RHEV can be easily integrated with other REDHAT software.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• RHV issues/bugs can be reported via Bugzilla to RH support. The service is great and typically responds soon.
• Red Hat distribution integration is seamless as it is integrated into the kernel.
• OpenStack support enables more customized VM templates and network configuration control.

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

• 1- RHVM API is pretty slow, especially after creating a VM it is not possible to retrieve the VM details (i.e VM's MAC Address) fast enough, where we need to place a pause in our Ansible Playbook, make the automation process slow.
• 2- RHV is still using collected to monitor the hypervisors which is deviating from Red Hat policy for other RHEL based applications to use PCP to monitor, which is richer in features.
• 3- It will be great if it is possible to patch the hypervisors using other tools such as satellite and not only via RHVM.
• 4- In the past Red Hat used to present patches in the z release (i.e. 4.3.z), and features in the y release (i.e 4. y), but starting from 4.4 that is mixed together wherein the Z release you get both patches and features, that is not good because that requires a lot of time to test when we patch as it includes features as well.
• 5- Engineering team has to be more reactive when new feature is requested.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

RHEV is an excellent product, includes more features, is less expensive, and has rock solid reliability and is backed with the best Red Hat Support in the industry. RHEV uses KVM under the hood which is used by all the big players in the industry (AWS, Rackspace, etc) to lower their overall costs and improve efficiency and profits and that's why RHEV is an excellent solution!

Incentivized

• 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

• RHEV has provided a positive ROI as our customers are not experiencing as many outages during maintenances.
• We have not experienced any catastrophic failures as a result of vsphere losing connection to the ntp.
• There has been a level of stability in our environment that was not previously experienced with our previous vendor.

Incentivized