# PowerScale Reviews **Vendor:** Dell Technologies **Category:** [Storage Systems Hardware](https://www.g2.com/categories/storage-systems) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 26 ## About PowerScale Dell PowerScale is a high‑performance, scale‑out network‑attached storage (NAS) solution designed to manage, protect, and extract value from massive volumes of unstructured data. Purpose‑built for data‑intensive workloads, PowerScale enables organizations to scale seamlessly from terabytes to petabytes while maintaining consistent performance, simplicity, and efficiency. Powered by the OneFS operating system, PowerScale delivers a single, intelligent file system across all nodes, eliminating data silos and simplifying storage management. Its modular, scale‑out architecture allows customers to add capacity or performance independently, ensuring infrastructure growth is always aligned with business needs—without downtime or disruption. PowerScale supports a wide range of workloads, including AI and machine learning, big data analytics, media and entertainment, life sciences, financial services, backup, and archive. High‑throughput performance and parallel access make it especially well‑suited for environments where fast data ingestion, processing, and collaboration are critical. Advanced data efficiency, security, and cyber‑resilience features are built in, helping organizations reduce storage costs while protecting valuable data. PowerScale integrates seamlessly with hybrid and multi‑cloud environments, enabling consistent access, protection, and mobility of data across on‑premises and cloud infrastructures. With automated operations, policy‑based management, and deep visibility into data usage, PowerScale empowers IT teams to focus less on storage administration and more on driving innovation from their data. Key Benefits -Massively scalable file storage from terabytes to petabytes and beyond -Single file system with linear, non‑disruptive scaling -Optimized for unstructured data, AI/ML, analytics, and high‑throughput workloads -High performance with parallel data access -Integrated security, ransomware protection, and data resilience -Seamless hybrid and multi‑cloud integration -Simplified management with intelligent automation Dell PowerScale provides the foundation organizations need to store, manage, and unlock insight from unstructured data—at scale, with confidence, and with the flexibility to evolve as data demands grow. ## PowerScale Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **ease of use** of PowerScale, appreciating its flexible integration with various tools and data sources. (1 reviews) - Users value the **vast integration capabilities** of PowerScale, enhancing flexibility and ease of use with their systems. (1 reviews) - Users value the **fast processing** capability of PowerScale, enhancing performance for multiple simultaneous streams. (1 reviews) - Users value the **flexibility** of PowerScale, enjoying seamless integration with various tools and data sources. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **vast integration capabilities** of PowerScale, enhancing flexibility and ease of use in existing systems. (1 reviews) - Real-time Streaming (1 reviews) - Search Efficiency (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users experience **difficult setup** and resource consumption issues with PowerScale, impacting overall system performance and efficiency. (1 reviews) - Users experience **excessive resource consumption** from PowerScale, leading to degraded system performance and increased setup time. (1 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** due to excessive resource consumption and lengthy setup times for PowerScale. (1 reviews) ## PowerScale Reviews ### 1. Power Scale: Top-Quality And Resilience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bogdan P. | Manager IT, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2026 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** The quality is very high, with a clear focus on performance and scalability. In my experience, the product is one of the best on the market for handling massive amounts of unstructured data. What I like most is its seamless scalability—we can scale capacity and performance independently without disrupting our workflows. The throughput speed is also incredibly reliable for our heavy workloads. Overall, the product is one of the best on the market. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** I don’t really have anything to dislike about the Power Scale. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** PowerScale helps us manage and scale large volumes of unstructured data. By consolidating our data into a single file system that’s easy to manage, it removes the need for a siloed storage architecture. For us, the biggest benefits are a major reduction in administrative overhead and much simpler capacity planning as our data continues to grow. ### 2. Highly reliable Scale-out NAS Storage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sundaram M. | Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 21, 2026 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** What I like best about PowerScale is that it is a highly scalable and simple to manage, scale-out NAS storage solution from DellEMC that excels with large, unstructured datasets and AI workloads. It provides us with the reliability we need since we never face any downtime, thanks to its redundant hardware with hot swappable capabilities. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** No SAN , I would say that one of the main concerns with PowerScale is that it can be quite expensive for storage solutions. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** It designed to solve the challenges of managing, scaling, and extracting value from the massive, ever-growing volume of unstructured data. it have Multi-Party Authorization so support can access it easily and resolve the issue remotely and have the dynamic licensing ### 3. Unmatched Scalability and Simplicity for Big Data Workloads **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sundaram M. | Storage Consultant , Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2025 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Its extreme scalability (managing petabytes easily), simplicity (single namespace, unified management), and performance for big data/AI workloads, thanks to the OneFS OS, multiprotocol access (NFS, SMB, S3), and efficiency features like deduplication/compression, all while delivering robust data protection and flexibility for modern unstructured data challenges. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Mainly issues related to cost, performance limitations for specific data types, complexity in certain operations, and aspects of the support experience. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** The single-file system, single-volume architecture simplifies management, allowing a single administrator to manage petabytes of data, which dramatically reduces administrative burden and operational costs. Automated tiering to the cloud or archive nodes further optimizes costs by matching data storage with its value and access needs. ### 4. High reliable Scale-out NAS Storage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravi S. | Senior Operarional Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2025 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** PowerScale is a product from DellEMC is a highly scalable, simple to manage, scale-out NAS storage solution that excels with large, unstructured datasets and AI workloads. We never face any downtime because all the redundant hardware with hot swappable. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** No SAN support. Its an expensive storage, cannot expect performance with small files **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** All Flash Powerscale storage is a best NAS, SMB/CIFS, HDFS and S3 protocols ### 5. Average: Helped in optimising data streams **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshit B. | Associate Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2024 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** The most beneficial thing that I liked about Dell Streaming Data Platform is that it have vast integration capabilities with various tools and data sources, this feature provided me flexibility and ease of usage in my existing system. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** This platform consumes too much resources which ultimately degrade the quality and performance of overall system. Also Dell Streaming Data Platform consume excess time for its configuration and intial setup. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helped me a lot in real time data processing of data streams. With that it also have a very strong security features which helped me a lot to make my data strams more secure and robust. ### 6. It is good to use as i was internal part of Dell technologies **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vedant K. | Software engineer 2, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 06, 2024 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Speed and the load balancing structure for multiple streamings **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** I don't feel any dislikes about it till now **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solving anaytics made from streaming ### 7. Dell EMC Islion - Powerful and user friendly storage solution. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gaurav R. | Azure Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** I am impressed with Dell EMC Isilon's scalability. The system's ability to scale from terabytes to petabytes of data allows us to easily expand our storage capacity as our needs change. In addition, Isilon's support for multiple protocols and ease of use is one the great features. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** One potential downside of Dell EMC Isilon is its cost. Isilon can be a relatively expensive storage solution, particularly for smaller organizations with limited budgets. Additionally, while Isilon is user-friendly, its advanced features and customization options may require more technical expertise to fully utilize. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Dell EMC Isilon is solving multiple problems for our organization, mainly with its scalability, support for multiple protocols, and ease of use. Isilon's ability to scale easily has saved us time and money compared to other storage solutions. Its versatility in supporting different protocols has made it a flexible storage solution. Its user-friendly interface and automated management features have made it easier for us to manage storage resources and focus on more strategic tasks. Overall, Dell EMC Isilon has provided significant benefits to our organization. ### 8. Next Level NAS Solutions as service like Isilon **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Soumyadip C. | Information Technology Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Compatibility, Management are those major features notice in Isilon with multiple Data Protection solutions when comes to Backup & DR . Additionally multi cloud architecture makes its more robust. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Deduplication seems to be less efficient which requires improvement. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Compatibility with external Data Protection vendor as well as it's console or Control plane performing management tasks. ### 9. Pretty Good experience with Dell Isilon NAS storage **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rajkishore S. | Domain Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Dell Isilon is quite good in handling large files like audio/vedio files. Capacity addition is quite seamless with just node addition. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Internal balance jobs impacts the performance of front end workload. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storage for large audio/vedio files with huge capacity availability. ### 10. Great and reliable NAS solution. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Hardware-wise - Dell is just perfect! We install the system and forget about the maintenance part. There will be rarely any failures unless the hardware rear outs or if my datacenter guy pick something out :p **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Back in 2018 when the product was new and still enhancing its feature then it was little pain to get the issue resolved and take a quite long to perform corrections however now it is quite stable. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** High performance from several write-intensive workloads. The application users don't feel they are sharing resources which resolve our security constraints as well. ### 11. Storage **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ashutosh S. | Sr SRE, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** SAN Solutions are the best solutions here. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** NFS comparability over Samba Clients. Hence. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Comparability of Samba Clients and users contacting via non maine protocol platforms. ### 12. Dell isilon is best for storage solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sushobhan B. | Lead Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Best scalability,capacity, multiple protocols **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Cost for small company.technical people are less **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data protection compatibility, lot of features ### 13. Easy to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chandrasekar M. | Senior Software Engineer **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2023 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Highly user friendly and flexible to set up with limited help **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Help and blogs are little tough to find. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps in setting up and solving data lake issues ### 14. Great Product with Expensive Support **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** With Isilon - Now Power Scale with Dell's rebranding. This product has constantly evolved from buggy releases to stable ones. The UI is very user friendly, you just need to spend few hours and you are all set to go unlike any new comers in this technology. You can have customized features from Isilon Engineering but again that comes with hefty price. Any bugs in the OS which is affecting business, the engineering is well versed to give a solution in least turnaround time. Drive failures work like magic - doesn't matter how many drives fail in a go, you don't have to work about your data. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** There is nothing much existing in the product which I dislike about Power Scale but it would have been great if this could also act as SAN apart from just NAS. It does not have great performance for Small files and you need to enable some configuration for it to work but that tends to use more storage. It should have flexibility to use other products for backup using a faster protocol. One of the biggest cons in terms of retainer through years - The support is very expensive. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Isilon offers great performance in terms of Read Write. It helps VFX studios with all the demand and never fails when used with right configuration as per workflow. Also, the backup SyncIQ certainly helps in creating multiple copies of data when used with another Isilon Device. Backup times are very short. ### 15. Valuation of isilon product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** NITESH SINGH . | System reliability engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 04, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Large amount of data we can save in products **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** It is for archival purpose product only and give less performance **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** For data archival ### 16. A very good EMC storage product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User **Reviewed Date:** September 27, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** It provides secure and efficient storage for achive storage. The performance and capacity is something great. The modular design is so comfortable to easily upgrade capacity and performance as well. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Block size is one issue. Deduplication is less efficient. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves security and data protection problems, providing good disaster recovery options and robust security options. ### 17. Secure & best for data protection **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ambika Apparao V. | TSE - 2 : Isilon NAS, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 10, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Storage, Security & backup Both ways can be managed by terminal and through webui Drive/node protection **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** All the features are in a way useful to the customers **Recommendations to others considering PowerScale:** Secure, best storage, scalable, backups /data protection **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Issues related to SMB, NFS shares, ndmp, synciq backup, Filesystem Scalable upto 254 nodes on a cluster Data protection with complete security to data ### 18. Its a great product for setting up data lake on premises. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Its a great product for setting up data lake on premises. Supports multi protocol along with data analytics offering from dellemc (cloudIQ). Scale out solution. Single storage pool and data protection scheme. Storage tiering. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Nothing as such, but it would be better to improve efficiency in terms of data storage (better compression & deduplication offering). **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** File access in multi-domain especially when it comes to PCI & Non-PCI compliance. ### 19. Easy Deployment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul M. | Infrastructure Architect in Cloud Migration & Modernization **Reviewed Date:** July 15, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Scalable archive storage solutions, ............................................................................. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** issue in performance some time . '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Capacity wise & good for Archival solution. ............................................... ### 20. Ordering and installation delays made this install take an inordinate amount of time. **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** The waterfall of shuffling data between the storage nodes was easy to configure. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Cost and overall service/support and cost of storage. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** storing data is all but trivial. ### 21. Isilon Key Features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Global Dedupe to minimize capacity requirements Customizable protection available for Multiple drive and node failures Multiple industry compliance certifications **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Nothing which lacks to suit unstructured data management **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Scaleout Architecture, Front & Backend Load Balancing, More than 15M IOPS ### 22. Dell Islon - Could be a better disk. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Good NAS storage devices. Huge amount of storage solutions provided. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** We have encountered a lot of outages due to mount issues when we were using Isilon. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Bulk storage solutions. ### 23. Extremely reliable and configurable NAS storage for the enterprise **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tim B. | Systems Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2020 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Since I am old UNIX/LINUX guy, and the operating system Isilon OneFS runs on is a FreeBSD Linux derivative, I love the fact that when you manage Isilon via CLI, you are using a full Linux shell (bash, zsh, etc). So if you're used to UNIX/LINUX and like CLI and scripting, you are in your element. Don't worry, there is a fast, robust web GUI as well. Isilon has all the features you want in a NAS: very fast and easy to use replication, file system snapshots, quotas, etc. Isilon scales out very easily (not necessarily cheaply). Just add nodes and you're in business. Dell EMCs sales and implementation teams are like an extension of our internal work teams. We treat each other like trusted coworkers, not really as customer-vendor. They are the best. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** The hardest thing for our organization to get used to coming from our old NAS solution (EMC Celerra) was how Isilon uses mixed ACLs to provide file system access when you share out data via both NFS and CIFS (if you use only NFS or only CIFS for a given share, it's simple). When you have mixed ACLs, and you then use traditional Windows share management to manage permissions, or manage permissions from an NFS client, the real file permissions you end up with on the Isilon/Linux back end might not be what you expect. So I have found that managing permission directly from Isilon is the most reliable method, and it just took a lot of trial and error to get file permissions and ownership right when using mixed ACLs. Also, depending on the size of your cluster, upgrades can take a long time, especially if you're doing something like drive firmware updates. Just something you have to accept. **Recommendations to others considering PowerScale:** As stated above, if you are migrating your data from another NAS solution, please be aware of how Isilon treats mixed NFS/CIFS ACLs. Don't expect it to just work. Test and experiment before you pull the trigger on your migration. And put UNIX/Linux people in charge of managing it, if you have them. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Isilon is our single Enterprise NAS solution. We use it for home directories, departmental shares, file/email/image archival -- basically, nearly all of our petabytes of unstructured data. We have Dell EMC ECS behind it as a cheaper, tiered solution for lesser-used static archive-type data. ### 24. Isilon gen6 feedback **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User **Reviewed Date:** November 03, 2020 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Multi os support, easily expandable , granular access control. Data can be distributed by nodes type based on performance needs. Scaled out architecture that can be upgraded with no disruption. Supports multi protocol. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Might be too complex for small environment. Where a smaller nas might fit better. Could be expensive sometimes. **Recommendations to others considering PowerScale:** I recommend using ISILON if you have a dvr like environment which generates lots of data. It is very Useful as well in case of data consolidation, so if you have many silos of linux, windows old servers and old nas that you want to get rid off. Isilon would be your best fit under to put all this data under one namespace. **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** Organizing Unstructured data. ACL very granular, you can give access to users based on active directory groups or to which network segments etc... Isilon scale out easily in size and performance. ### 25. EMC Isilon is a best scale out NAS performance in the market **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kunal G. | Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Due to its 3 A's ie scalability, reliability and performance Dell Isilon scale up by simply adding a node redundancy. Rolling upgrade are applied without any disruption to Business Backup - We use 55% for just backing/archiving our data and it is very quick. Replication is excellent. Dell Isilon architecture is great and have been accepted globally many organization. We have been using the solution from past 4 years **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Managing ownership's, deleting large snapshots are not easy tasks in Isilon. **Recommendations to others considering PowerScale:** We have lot of security/permissions issues in Isilon which we never saw in case of NetApp or HP. There are lot of other storage solutions available in the market which can be tested as proof of concept (POC). **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is part of our converged/data consolidation road map plan where we implemented the Dell EMC Isilon cluster in addition to our existing NetApp solution. We have a requirement for more cifs/nfs shares due to exponential data growth by different applications and doesn't need to be on the local storage. Isilon also solved some of the security issues which we were unable to solve in our existing NetApp storage. Isilon is one of the low cost storage and can be used for nfs/cifs and even as SAN storage ### 26. Dell review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2019 **What do you like best about PowerScale?** Computers work well for the most part. No major issues. **What do you dislike about PowerScale?** Sometimes they freeze up and cause things to be at a standstill **What problems is PowerScale solving and how is that benefiting you?** No paper medical records - [View PowerScale pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/powerscale/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-12+08%3A26%3A31+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=cf0d66bc-593a-4e5e-92f9-e9ecda86dd40&secure%5Btoken%5D=859885122010472f6fa8d2e0397d5041a9f289747144bac0fe4587e66788bad6&format=llm_user) ## PowerScale Integrations - [Prometheus](https://www.g2.com/products/prometheus/reviews) ## Top PowerScale Alternatives - [IBM Storage FlashSystem](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-storage-flashsystem/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (231 reviews) - [NetApp E-Series](https://www.g2.com/products/netapp-e-series/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (18 reviews) - [TrueNAS](https://www.g2.com/products/truenas/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (166 reviews)