Isilon adds to "scale-out" NAS range

Isilon adds to "scale-out" NAS range

March 17, 2009:Isilon Systems has announced a broad expansion of its product family with the release of the S-Series and NL-Series storage systems, and a new addition to its X-Series product line.

Isilon scale-out NAS solutions run on the OneFS operating system software which is now in its fifth iteration. They claim to break the performance and scalability bottlenecks associated with traditional NAS and SAN architectures.

"With file-based data eclipsing block-based data as the dominant form of information being created in the enterprise, businesses can no longer afford to face this unprecedented challenge with the complex architectures of traditional approaches," saidSujal Patel, CEO, Isilon Systems.

"Instead, they must adopt integrated and widely applicable solutions that drive business value while reducing operational and capital expenditures. Isilon's new products serve a wide array of file-based data applications across the enterprise and data-driven vertical markets, increasing workflow productivity and operational efficiency while aligning capital expenditures directly with continued storage growth."

The Isilon IQ 5400S delivers more than 1 million IOPS from a single file system - claimed to be 10X more than the leading traditional NAS Fibre Channel solution - and over 30 gigabytes per second (GBps) of aggregate throughput from a single file system.

With its significant transactional performance increase, the 5400S enables enterprises to properly support mission-critical applications, accelerate business processes and speed time-to-market, while empowering verticals such as media and entertainment and design and simulation with the efficient high-performance their process-heavy workloads require.

Combining 15,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive technology, Quad-Gigabit Ethernet front-end networking, high performance InfiniBand back-end node interconnects, and up to 16 gigabytes (GB) of globally coherent cache per node with Isilon's OneFS operating system, the S-Series delivers the highest performance scale-out NAS system for the most data-intensive file-based applications.

"At Sony Pictures Imageworks we use an all digital workflow to deliver state of the art visual effects production and character animation," said Nick Bali, senior software engineer,Sony Pictures Imageworks . "With continuing advances in effects technology, our need for greater performance and capacity grows with each subsequent project. Isilon continues to deliver with the new S-Series, providing a storage solution that easily scales performance and capacity in parallel with the rapid growth of our visual effects pipeline."

The Isilon IQ 36000X is the latest addition to Isilon's X-Series, delivering up to 3.45 petabytes (PB) of capacity and over 30 GBps of throughput from a single file system, which is 60X more than traditional scale-up NAS storage systems. Featuring a 3X increase in capacity per node and a 33 percent increase in disk density per rack unit over previous X-Series models, the 36000X allows businesses to quickly scale capacity and performance linearly as data grows. Additionally, the 36000X, along with all of Isilon's scale-out NAS systems, delivers much higher utilization rates than traditional NAS or SAN storage - 80 percent versus 50 percent for competing solutions - increasing data center efficiency and decreasing cost of ownership.

The Isilon IQ 36NL houses 36 TB of raw storage in a 4U chassis and scales out to 3.45 PB in a single file system, or greater than 200X traditional scale-up NAS storage systems, delivering the best dollar per TB ratio of any scale-out NAS solution on the market. Leveraging Isilon's OneFS operating system, the 36NL provides near-primary accessibility with near-tape value to offer the lowest overall total cost of ownership of any scale-out NAS nearline storage solution available.

With the Isilon IQ 36NL, enterprises can eliminate the need for multiple archive systems and unify their critical business information onto one seamlessly scalable, easy-to-use solution to accelerate data access and reduce operational costs. Likewise, customers in fields such as the bioinformatics and Web 2.0 can rely on the Isilon IQ 36NL to furnish cost-efficient repositories for their ever-growing volumes of analytical data and rich media content. Additionally, when combined with Isilon's SyncIQ® asynchronous replication software, the 36NL delivers a complete solution for disk-based disaster recovery.

Isilon's S-Series, NL-Series and X-Series products are all immediately available. The Isilon IQ 5400S is listed at $49,999 per node. The Isilon IQ 36000X is listed at $137,000 per node. The Isilon IQ 36NL is listed at $72,000 per node.

Comment on this story.

Business Solution: