Powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system, Isilon H500 is scale-out NAS that stays simple to manage no matter how large your environment becomes. Automated storage tiering between chassis and cloud integration help optimize your storage resources. Protect file data with enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery options.
Customer Reviews
Tim B.
Advanced user of Isilon H500Since 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.
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.
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.
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.
