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Dell EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS - Best of Breed
August 28, 2018

Dell EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS - Best of Breed

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS

We are using Isilon Scale-Out NAS across all departments within our organization. We use it for storing everything from administrative data (Excel and word documents) to research and multimedia projects. Isilon allows us to grow seamlessly (our environment has been growing at a very rapid rate) and to provide our users with the space and protection their data needs.
  • Snapshots of folders/files which integrate with Microsoft VSS (previous versions). This allows for quick recovery of lost or deleted files.
  • Replication of data to a secondary location. We do not need to try to backup such a large environment since we are replicating off site.
  • Integration with with our Identity management. We can allow users to access files using Active Directory authentication and SMB or NFS protocols.
  • Job engine. The larger the cluster becomes, the longer some of the jobs can run (AutoBalance, DeDupe). Some jobs can not run at the same time, meaning you have to wait for 1 to finish.
  • Support - Support has been less than spectacular over the last 2 years or so.
  • Meta Data analysis. You need to use third party tools to catalog and search meta data.
  • We were able to consolidate multiple Windows Files servers into our 1 Isilon and users can easily navigate to find their files.
  • With snapshots and replication we are able to protect data both locally and off site without having to worry about backup windows.
  • We are able to quickly and easily add capacity as needed. No fork lift upgrades.
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.
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.