Item: Dell PowerScale
Rating: 9
Author: Vishal Ranjan Srivastav

Overall Satisfaction with EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Isilon clusters are the most widely used storage solution in our environment. Isilon is used to store mostly media content. Isilon provides a highly scalable and power packed solution. It is being used company-wide and in some other departments as well. We use Isilon to create home directories of hundreds of users as it is very easily accessible and provides very high throughput.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The installation of the cluster is very quick and simple.
The cluster provides very high performance and throughput.
Isilon is very scalable and works on scale-out architecture. So when we add a new node, it not only increases the capacity but, also increases the performance linearly as well.
Management of the array is very easy.
GUI is very user-friendly and so does the CLI which is very smart.

Cons

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.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Isilon is best suited for organizations where a huge amount of unstructured data needs to be stored and also requires a very high performance as well. Isilon is also very suited for businesses where capacity requirement along with the need for more performance will be increasing as time passes. An organization where storage needs to be locally [accessed] and capacity requirements are not high, can go for other products.

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Isilon - The scalable and Fast Storage