Dell PowerScale: Features, Benefits & Alternatives

Dell PowerScale

Dell PowerScale is the name of Dell Technologies’ scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solution. It combines a modified version of the Isilon OneFS software tuned for Dell PowerEdge servers. The systems provide unified access to files and unstructured data.

According to Dell, PowerScale is designed to provide high-performance storage for unstructured data workloads and is well-suited for demanding file and object storage requirements.

In 2020, Dell rebranded many of the acquired EMC technologies such as EMC Isilon to PowerScale.

About Dell PowerScale

Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon) storage solutions are designed to help manage data for enterprises of all types. The systems are simple to install, manage, and scale to virtually any size and include a choice of all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes.

PowerScale solutions stay flexible and reliable no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future. It is used in a variety of industries, including media and entertainment, healthcare, research, and financial services, where large-scale data storage, high performance, and data-intensive workloads are critical.

Whether your use case is cloud tiering, cloud data migration, or optimizing performance and reducing storage costs, Dell PowerScale allows you to:

  • Identify data that can move to Dell PowerScale targets
  • Forecast Dell PowerScale (Isilon) storage savings and ROI
  • Access data from Dell PowerScale ECS storage without lock-in
  • Migrate object data into Dell PowerScale ECS
  • Deliver a Smart Data Migration
  • Manage unstructured data costs more effectively
  • Scale on demand
  • Ensure you have an easy, fast, no-lock-in path to the cloud for on-premises file and object data

Key Benefits of Dell EMC PowerScale

With Dell PowerScale, your data lake always stays simple to manage, simple to grow, and simple to protect. It is also simple enough to handle the most demanding current and future workloads.

The system is ideal for companies of any size, from small enterprises to multi-national ones. Its storage provides secure collaboration, modular scalability, flexible consumption models, and easy cloud integrations. All of these with management tools spanning multiple platforms.

  • Centralized management: Manage your storage infrastructure from a single unified platform.
  • Data protection: Dell PowerScale offers security, data protection, and replication tools. Back up and protect your data from cyber-attacks with an integrated ransomware defense system.
  • Artificial intelligence: PowerScale is the foundation for building an integrated and optimized IT infrastructure for AI projects, from concept to production.
  • Cloud support: Store and manage your data on the cloud and move data between your data center and the cloud. Dell PowerScale runs data-intensive cloud workloads with no outbound traffic costs.
  • Long-term storage: Dell PowerScale offers highly efficient and resilient active archive storage or long-term data retention for large-scale data archives. With the proven scalability architecture of PowerScale, you can meet your growing archiving demands. It has a wide variety of enterprise-grade data protection and security options to keep your archived data safe.

Additional Benefits

Other Dell EMC PowerScale benefits include:

  • Scale without disruption: PowerScale clusters can scale from 11TB raw capacity to 60PB and millions of file operations without disruption or costly downtime for customers. Nodes can be added to either PowerScale or an existing Isilon cluster in just 60 seconds.
  • Intelligent automation: With smart scale-out capabilities, PowerScale distributes resources effectively so that customers can get the most performance out of a cluster.
  • Resilient and efficient: Through flexible failover policies, PowerScale delivers up to 85% storage utilization across a cluster and can sustain multi-node failures.
  • Programmable infrastructure: With support for a number of leading management and container orchestration frameworks, such as Kubernetes, and Ansible, customers can streamline application development and reduce deployment timeframes.
  • Any application: PowerScale OneFS 9.0 features broad multiprotocol support, including new S3 support for modern apps relying on object storage. Additional support for protocols including NFS, SMB and HDFS, allow customers to run a large number of traditional and modern applications without compatibility concerns.
  • Deployment flexibility: PowerScale can easily deploy in core data centers, in edge locations or as part of a multi-cloud strategy. The compact 1U footprint and minimum cluster size of new all-flash F200 and NVMe F600 PowerScale nodes make it an ideal option for edge deployments.
  • Multi-cloud support: PowerScale for Multi-cloud can directly connect to all major public clouds as a managed service. It is ideal for customers looking to move or deploy demanding apps in the cloud. Google Cloud customers looking to save time and management complexity can choose Dell Technologies Cloud PowerScale for Google Cloud. This is a native cloud service that combines the performance, scale, and consistent experience of PowerScale with the economics and simplicity of Google Cloud.

Is PowerScale same as Isilon?

Isilon is a scale-out NAS appliance solution developed over 20 years ago by Isilon and later by Dell EMC. It was the first scalable enterprise storage solution and was recently renamed to PowerScale.

What is the difference between PowerStore and PowerScale?

Dell Powerstore offers affordable next-generation storage technology that combines cutting-edge storage hardware with the flexibility & simplicity of modern software design.

In contrast, Dell Powerscale is a simple, flexible, and secure data storage solution that enables you to create an enterprise data lake for diverse and demanding on-premise and public cloud workloads.

Best Dell PowerScale Alternatives

Veeam Backup & Replication

Veeam Backup & Replication is a backup and recovery software that delivers availability for cloud, virtual, Kubernetes, and physical workloads. Through a simple-by-design management console, it offers users a fast, flexible, reliable backup, archival, recovery, and replication.

Backup capabilities

  • Continuous Data Protection
  • Fast, reliable application-aware, image-based backups
  • Unlimited capacity and cost savings for long-term data retention on object storage with new Veeam Cloud Tier
  • Enterprise application support for Veeam Plug-ins for SAP HANA and Oracle RMAN

Replication capabilities

  • Instant recovery for NAS, Microsoft SQL and Oracle
  • Recover individual files easily with Instant VM and File-level Recovery
  • Easy portability and recovery to AWS, Azure and Azure Stack with NEW Veeam Cloud Mobility

Recovery capabilities

  • Recover individual files with Instant VM and File-level Recovery
  • Portability and recovery to AWS, Azure and Azure Stack with NEW Veeam Cloud Mobility
  • Fast, item-level and application recovery for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and SQL Server and Oracle

Red Hat Ceph Storage

Red Hat Ceph Storage is an enterprise open-source platform that provides unified software-defined storage on standard, economical servers and disks. With block, object, and file storage combined into one platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage efficiently and automatically manages all your data.

Able to handle 1 billion objects—and beyond—Red Hat Ceph Storage is optimized for large installations and today’s massive data needs, scaling performance as capacity scales. Through advancements like its new object front end, it can double the performance of previous versions while helping you get to market faster.

Also, because it is tightly integrated with the Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage makes installation and upgrades easier and enables hyperconvergence for maximal resource use and centralized administration. 

IBM FlashSystem

IBM FlashSystem products are enterprise computer data storage systems that store data on flash memory chips. Unlike storage systems that use standard solid-state drives, they incorporate custom hardware based on technology from the 2012 acquisition of Texas Memory Systems.

This hardware provides performance, reliability, and efficiency benefits versus competitive offerings.

IBM FlashSystem storage provides enterprise-grade system availability and data security features that include non-disruptive data migration and remote mirroring using IBM HyperSwap technology. This also includes “six nines” availability, isolated and immutable copies, hardware-accelerated data-at-rest encryption, and an IBM-distributed RAID technology that can reduce disk rebuild times substantially compared to traditional RAID solutions.

The systems leverage the cost advantages of multiple flash drive options and feature an intuitive user interface, synchronous/asynchronous replication, and more than 600 application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, IBM FlashSystem provides affordable, non-disruptive upgrade paths that deliver increased performance, scalability, and functionality.

MinIO

MinIO is an open-source object storage system. It is designed to efficiently store and retrieve unstructured data, such as photos, videos, and backups. MinIO can function as a standalone object storage server or as part of a larger system, such as a data lake or a private cloud. It can also be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. This makes it a flexible storage solution for a variety of use cases.

The system’s features include erasure coding, bitrot protection, and checksum validation, which help ensure data integrity and reliability. Its multi-tenancy support makes it ideal for multi-user environments. MinIO’s edge computing tools enable data storage and processing closer to users’ locations, reducing latency and improving performance.

MinIO offers several key benefits and features for organizations looking for a scalable and high-performing object storage solution. These include:

  • Scalability: Horizontally scale to increase storage space and processing power as your needs grow.
  • High performance: MinIO’s edge computing and low latency provide fast data access.
  • Data integrity: Security features, such as erasure coding, bitrot protection, and checksum validation, ensure data integrity and reliability.
  • Reduced costs: MinIO is an open-source solution, making it a cost-effective option for organizations looking for a scalable object storage solution.
  • Support: MinIO’s large open-source community of developers and users provides a wide range of resources and an active support network
  • Easy deployment: MinIO is easy to deploy and can run on a variety of platforms, including on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
  • Access control: Role-based access control, enabling you to control access to data based on users’ permissions.
  • Intuitive interface: MinIO’s user-friendly dashboard is accessible via any browser. It can perform multiple object operations including object creation and management.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs.

In addition, the solution is capable of modernizing data centers and can handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly.

By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

  • Easy to manage: The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.
  • User-friendly GUI
  • Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
  • Low latency
  • Hybrid storage: This gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure
  • Both file-level and block-level replication

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