Dell PowerScale vs. Red Hat Gluster Storage

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dell PowerScale
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
Dell Technologies presents Dell PowerScale (replacing EMC Isilon) as a scale-out NAS solution and server technology that provides the flexibility of a software-defined architecture with accelerated hardware innovations to harness the value of data. Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC in 2010; some EMC Isilon NAS appliances are still available and supported under the PowerScale brand.N/A
Red Hat Gluster Storage
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.N/A
Pricing
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Small Businesses

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StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Score 9.0 out of 10
StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Score 9.0 out of 10
IBM Spectrum Scale
IBM Spectrum Scale
Score 9.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(5 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell PowerScaleRed Hat Gluster Storage
Likelihood to Recommend
Dell Technologies
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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Red Hat
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
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Pros
Dell Technologies
  • NAS Storage
  • Capacity and Performance details of the array
  • Alert and Operations details
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Red Hat
  • Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
  • Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
  • Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
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Cons
Dell Technologies
  • 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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Red Hat
  • Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
  • Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
  • Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
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Alternatives Considered
Dell Technologies
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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Red Hat
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
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Return on Investment
Dell Technologies
  • 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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Red Hat
  • Positive - Alignment with the open source community and being able to stay abreast of the latest trending products available.
  • Positive - Reduced procurement and maintenance costs.
  • Negative - Impacts user/system maintainer training in order to teach them how to utilize and troubleshoot the product.
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