Dell PowerScale vs Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Dell Technologies and Rubrik are both solutions in the NAS category. Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8, while Rubrik is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.7. Dell Technologies holds a 13.3% mindshare in N, compared to Rubrik’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Rubrik users who would recommend it.

Dell PowerScale

Read 107 Dell PowerScale reviews

18,812 Views
10,535 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct

Read 3 Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct reviews

524 Views
524 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Dell PowerScale

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Dell PowerScale and Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct compete in data management and storage solutions. Dell PowerScale has the upper hand in scalability and integration, while Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct offers better cloud data management and access to cloud services.

Features: Dell PowerScale is known for its linear scalability, high-performance capabilities, and seamless storage expansion. It efficiently manages data handling, providing substantial storage solutions. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct focuses on cloud-native architecture with automated data protection, streamlined data management, and disaster recovery features for enhanced operational efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell PowerScale provides straightforward deployment with robust integration tools, suitable for a wide range of enterprise environments. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct emphasizes quick deployment with minimal configuration. Both offer excellent customer support, but Rubrik supports automated updates and intuitive management, reducing administrative tasks.

Pricing and ROI: Dell PowerScale has higher initial setup costs due to its integration and infrastructure but offers long-term value. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct presents a competitive pricing model, achieving rapid ROI with cost-effective data management, appealing to organizations focused on cloud capabilities and operational cost efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerScale vs. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale vs. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct

September 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Dell PowerScale

Ranking in NAS

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

107

Ranking in other categories

File and Object Storage (1st)

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct

Ranking in NAS

15th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Dell PowerScale is 13.3%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NAS Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dell PowerScale	13.3%
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct	0.8%
Other	85.9%

NAS

Featured Reviews

RahulSharma8

Storage Platform Engineer at Expedia Group

Unified file sharing has simplified multi-tenant access and has delivered seamless data replication

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) includes its replication features; when we decommissioned our old Isilon cluster, we migrated all of the data to a new cluster, and it was pretty seamless. All you have to do is create the certificates and make those certificates available to the target cluster, then initiate a few jobs. The inter-cluster replication feature, called SyncIQ, allows you to set up all of the jobs and move your data entirely, either timely or all at once. Another suitable feature is the ability to back up your directories; you can take snapshots for all of your directories, and in fact, I believe you can take around a thousand snapshots for a single directory. The inter-replication, geo-replication is one feature. Dell provides a variety class of hardware suitable for your workloads, meaning if your data is just lab and not critical, you don't have to spend much on the hardware; conversely, if your data is mission-critical, you can buy a high-performance node from Dell. Additionally, you can span Dell PowerScale (Isilon) cluster to a large number of nodes, and code upgrades are pretty smooth because all protocols will be upgraded under a single piece of code. Since it provides a single file system that spans across the nodes, you don't have to worry about that directory structure being separately created on individual nodes, making it a fitting solution for a data lake solution because you can access the same data from multiple protocols.

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Evans Asomah

Senior IT Analyst at a government with 201-500 employees

Unified backups have protected our government data and streamlined daily user lifecycle management

One way Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct can be improved is the interface is fine and everything looks good. However, I think we should be able to do more at the kernel level, I mean the CDM level, the CLI level. I am very heavy in CLI, so I would want more of the features to push into the commands as part of the CLI. The other thing I want to add is that the documentation is kind of vague sometimes. I skim through a lot of documents, but I always end up doing things my own way. I would really want the team to improve on the documentation with a lot of screenshots and go-throughs. So far, it has been okay. If I could change or improve one thing about Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, the features so far are okay for now.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Since it can scale so easily, as long as I have money to buy more nodes, I can grow it as big as I need to. That is important in our business. As sequencing technologies continue to evolve, and as those technologies evolve, the amount of data generation never gets smaller. It just always seems to get bigger. This is one of the absolute key aspects: We can grow on demand without having to forklift stuff."

"The single pane of glass for both IT and for the end-user is a valuable feature. On the IT side, I can actually control where things are stored, whether something is stored on solid-state drives or spinning drives... The single pane of glass makes it very easy to use and very easy to understand. We started at 100 terabytes and we moved to 250 and it still feels like the exact same system and we're able to move data as needed."

"This solution offers flexibility in supporting various data workloads and is very easy to work with, making it our go-to solution for all data storage."

"I feel that the reliability and availability of Dell PowerScale have positively affected my company's data operations as it's running stably, and we haven't had service outages or anything of that nature, so it's been very helpful."

"What I appreciate about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) are its best features: it supports both file and object storage, and it is very easy to manage."

"The overall operational efficiency and ease of use of Dell PowerScale is commendable; it is very good storage with easy access via GUI, meaning we do not need to perform many complex maneuvers for storage management."

"Using this product has enabled us to maximize the business value of our data because now, we can store all of our data in one place."

"What I like the most about Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is that the storage capacity is very high."

More Dell PowerScale pros

"Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has positively impacted my organization as the holy grail for our county because we basically rely on it every day for off-boarding, on-boarding, accounts being purged, and we are able to bring them back to life, attach old mailboxes to users, detach mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, and basically everything, making it such a winning member of the team."

"Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has positively impacted my organization by showing at least a seventy to eighty percent reduction in manual effort for agent monitoring and investigating, which is exceptional."

"Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct has improved my organization with secured backups, and even in case of attacks, we are safe with respect to the backup data we have."

Cons

"The biggest weakness is small file handling."

"There is room for improvement with the updates. It can take a significant amount of time to do a major OS update. However, even though it takes multiple reboots, the cluster stays up. If we want to apply a newer version of the OS, we have to roll back some of the patches so that we can upgrade. It requires a few reboots just to do that. The cluster doesn't come down, everything is still running, but it's time-consuming, at times."

"We have issues in Brazil with the procurement of solutions because we have to check the entire market and justify the pricing to our audit institutions, making it difficult to keep with the same vendor."

"Dell's customer service needs improvement. Specifically, hardware failures under warranty should be addressed within the promised timeline."

"The solution’s interface and pricing could be improved."

"I believe the support engineers need to improve their skills."

"There is room for improvement in its handling of object storage."

"They should add some new services that should be for on-premises, and more analytics should be there for the data, allowing for a deep dive from that analytics, which is currently missing."

More Dell PowerScale cons

"The other thing I want to add is that the documentation is kind of vague sometimes."

"In terms of stability, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is still not stable as it is evolving, so I would give it a seven or eight."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I always want things to be less expensive. However, I would say the pricing is fair. Their costs are in alignment with their competitors. It is a good value for the money."

"The pricing is excellent."

"We use the TNA approach which is a great opportunity for us to better manage the licenses based on how much consumption is available for the different customers so we can use that approach and scalability."

"Price was also a significant factor in our decision to go with PowerScale. The team at EMC, now Dell EMC, came through with a highly competitive offer that tipped the scales towards their solution. There was only one other solution around the same price point, but it could not match PowerScale on features. That other solution is no longer on the market."

"The solution is expensive; it is not the cheapest solution out there. If you look at it from a total cost of ownership perspective, then it is a very compelling solution. However, if you're looking at just dollar per terabyte and not looking at the big picture, then you could be distracted by the price. It is not an amazing price, but it's pretty good. It is also very good when you consider the total cost of ownership and ease of management."

"This solution is priced slightly higher than others on the market but does offer good quality. With this solution's data reduction and compression, we were able to purchase less. Costs have dropped because of the data rate of compression and deduplication."

"The general cost for a system like this is expensive. The total cost depends on your use case. You need to pay for every additional feature that you use."

"Dell PowerScale (Isilon) is an expensive solution."

More Dell PowerScale pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	66

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

I think the price is reasonable. We procured this during the time of COVID, around 2022, and the price was very competitive. If you are looking for technology, there will also be a price associated...

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What needs improvement with Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

The disadvantage that I felt is not hardware-related. I feel that Dell needs to focus on the service aspects. Once they sell this hardware to customers, customers also expect service from them. Del...

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What is your primary use case for Dell EMC PowerScale (Isilon)?

Dell PowerScale is used for keeping our company data. Continental is an automotive company, and we keep recording files on a petabyte basis. We have globally around more than 200 petabytes of Dell ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct?

Regarding the pricing of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct, I am not sure because there is a separate team who is working on the cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct?

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is working as expected, and I cannot come up with any improvements. It has given us a great return. Before we take aggressive blocking rules, there is a risk of creating unn...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct?

My main use case for Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is taking real-time actions to see how they are responding if an agent is working in a certain behavior and how it's going if an agent is misbehaving. I...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 44% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale

October 2026

Download Dell PowerScale product report

Buyer's Guide

NAS

October 2026

Download Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct product report

Also Known As

PowerScale, Dell EMC Isilon

No data available

Overview

As a storage engine in Dell AI Data Platform, Dell PowerScale is the world's #1 scale-out NAS platform for enterprise unstructured data. Trusted by more than 25,000 customers, including more than 1,500 customers running GPU workloads, PowerScale uses OneFS operating system to provide a single namespace and unified file and object access for AI/ML training, RAG pipelines, analytics, media production, and life sciences, and other demanding workloads. PowerScale F710 was the world’s first Ethernet-based storage appliance certified with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Selected configurations support NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, pNFS, and NFS over RDMA for high-throughput parallel AI data access. PowerScale supports near-linear, non-disruptive scaling from terabytes to petabytes. Available in all-flash, hybrid, and archive configurations for on-premises and cloud deployment options, including AWS and Azure. Supported next-generation configurations deliver up to 35 GB/s read throughput per node.

Dell PowerScale Isilon provides a comprehensive platform for unstructured data, excelling in scalability, management, and performance. With features like single-pane management, SyncIQ, and SmartQuotas, it handles large datasets with flexibility and robust security. Its multi-protocol support and seamless expansion improve operational efficiency. While it offers strong data protection, enhancements in cloud integration, cybersecurity, and performance are sought. Users note potential for cost reductions and streamlined configurations and mention desired improvements in object storage handling and NFS support.

What are the key features of Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Single-pane management: Simplifies data control and monitoring through a unified interface.
SyncIQ: Ensures efficient data replication for business continuity.
SmartQuotas: Provides intelligent quota management for optimized storage allocation.
Multi-protocol support: Facilitates cross-platform data access and integration.
Seamless storage expansion: Allows effortless scaling to accommodate growing data needs.

What benefits should users consider when reviewing Dell PowerScale Isilon?

Operational efficiency: Reduces workload with easy management and automation.
Enhanced security: Offers comprehensive data protection and recovery options.
Scalability: Supports large-scale data storage with flexible growth capabilities.
Performance: Delivers high-speed data processing for demanding applications.
Integration flexibility: Adapts to on-prem and hybrid cloud environments for diverse deployment needs.

Organizations across industries utilize Dell PowerScale Isilon for large-scale unstructured storage, supporting applications like video archiving, genomic data storage, and high-resolution imaging. Educational institutions, research centers, and media enterprises rely on its scaled-out storage capabilities, providing centralized, secure storage for diverse applications in hybrid, cloud, and on-prem environments.

Dell Technologies

Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct offers powerful data management for enterprise environments, ensuring efficient storage and backup capabilities. Its flexibility and scalability align well with the evolving needs of large organizations.

Designed for the modern enterprise, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct delivers fast data recovery and reduced storage costs by seamlessly integrating with cloud services. It simplifies managing large datasets with robust data protection mechanisms. Organizations benefit from its ability to scale operations efficiently while maintaining high security and performance standards.

What are the key features of Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct?

Seamless Integration: Effortlessly connects with cloud platforms for enhanced agility.
Data Archiving: Provides effective long-term data storage and compliance solutions.
High-Speed Recovery: Ensures rapid restoration of data for business continuity.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing data needs without compromising system performance.
Security: Offers advanced encryption and access controls to protect sensitive data.

What are the benefits of using Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct?

Cost Efficiency: Helps reduce operational expenses related to data storage and management.
Improved Data Access: Simplifies data retrieval processes, enhancing productivity.
Enhanced Data Security: Provides robust security features to safeguard critical information.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines data management tasks, freeing up resources for other initiatives.

In industries such as finance and healthcare, Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct is implemented to manage vast amounts of data securely and efficiently, ensuring compliance with industry regulations and enhancing data accessibility across departments.

Rubrik

Sample Customers

OMRF, University of Utah, Translational Genetics Research Institute, Arcis, Geofizyka Torumn, Cyprus E&P Corporation, Colburn School, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, National Library of France,

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Dell PowerScale vs. Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct

September 2026

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