New EMC Isilon With 2X Performance at Half Cost

Highlights

• Updates to EMC Isilon storage deliver ant enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake, enabling next-generation workloads such as Hadoop analytics, cloud and mobile.
• More scalable than other approaches for data consolidation into a single file system, single volume Data Lake.
• New Isilon S210 and Isilon X410 platforms feature 2X performance
• New SmartFlash flash-cache capabilities and support for next-generation workload protocols.
• EMC and Pivotal launch new Data Lake Hadoop Bundle that unlocks insights from unstructured data.

EMC Corporation upgrades its Isilon OneFS, new Isilon platforms and new solutions that reinforce the industry’s first enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake.

The new products and capabilities, which include ongoing support for HDFS, will help customers advance their ability to ingest, store, protect and manage massive amounts of unstructured data. By leveraging HDFS for the Data Lake, EMC enables customers to bring Hadoop to their big data rather than vice versa – avoiding the time and costs involved with moving petabytes of data.

Data Lakes are gaining popularity as the go-to, highly scalable repository for storing data from a variety of sources, generated by traditional and next-generation workloads, and consumed through a range of mechanisms without needing to be managed by separate, multiple silos of storage. Data Lakes are an order of magnitude more scalable than existing approaches for consolidation into a single file system, single volume Data Lake and, with today’s Hadoop capabilities, the Isilon Data Lake is analytic-ready.

New Isilon software, hardware and solution offerings enable customers to build an enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake that leverages Isilon storage and enterprise-grade services including data protection, data management, performance management and security. Core to its Data Lake offering, EMC has redefined scale-out NAS through two new Isilon platforms – the Isilon S210 and Isilon X410 – and OneFS software, delivering 2X the performance and heightened agility over previous generations.

Isilon X410

Known for its near-limitless scale, Isilon handles petabytes of big data in industries that create massive amounts of sensitive data that directly correlate to their bottom lines, including media and entertainment, financial services and life sciences. The new Isilon offerings work together to further enhance scale per cluster, performance, agility and cost-effectiveness in these most-demanding environments.

Other solutions create ‘islands’ of storage that are difficult and costly to manage, resulting in hot spots, inefficiencies and poor storage utilization. They also require heavy lifting to scale. The Isilon-enabled Data Lake supports multiple protocols and access methods such as NFS, SMB, NDMP, HDFS, OBJECT via ViPR and OpenStack Swift native Object, supporting both traditional workloads such as home directories and file shares as well as next-generation workloads such as analytics, cloud applications and mobile sync-and-share.

New Software and Platforms
Isilon’s OS, OneFS, is a core building block for the scale-out NAS. The new version (OneFS 7.1.1) includes new SmartFlash, a flash-based cache enabling customers to get to their data more quickly which can scale up to one petabyte in a single cluster. The result is optimized performance with simplified management, 100% flash efficiency and reduced latency for traditional and next-generation workloads.

EMC also unveiled the Isilon S210 and X410. The S210 runs up to 3.75 million IO/s per cluster and provides flexible configuration and deployment, making it for high transactional workloads for industries such as media and entertainment and financial services. The X410 offers 70% increase in throughput at 33% less $/MB/s, and its versatility supports Hadoop analytics, HPC and enterprise file applications.

New Hadoop Big Data Analytics Solutions
Also announced, EMC and Pivotal Software, Inc. revealed a new big data analytics solution, reinforcing EMC’s position in Hadoop storage infrastructure. EMC is the first scale-out NAS provider to natively integrate HDFS for big data analytics, and the #1 market leader in enterprise shared storage for HDFS. The solution is offered as a Data Lake Hadoop Bundle, providing the ability to gain powerful analytics capabilities quickly and easily with the cost advantages of an efficient scale-out platform.

In related news, VCE announced that it will offer Vblock Systems with Isilon for scale-out VDI and Hadoop analytics through new technology extensions.

Isilon OneFS 7.1.1 and the S210 and X410 storage platforms and all solutions will be available in July 2014. Support for enhanced HDFS and OpenStack SWIFT Object protocols are expected to be available by the end of 2014.

Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “The rate of innovation in unstructured storage has accelerated over the past five years. Scale-out architectures that used to be considered cutting edge technology used only for high-performance computing have been applied to core data center operations, giving us a base to build new scalable IT solutions on. Now EMC, with its next-generation Isilon product, is delivering on the promise of shared data across applications and accessible anywhere, any time.”

Saker Klippsten, CTO, Zoic Studioswww.zoicstudios.com, said: “EMC has shown its commitment to pushing design forward with the new X410 and X210 platforms by increasing performance and capacity for Isilon, giving companies like ours the room to grow intelligently. We tend to push these products well beyond what most industries could test against, not only from a performance standpoint, but in actual production usage. Like some of our peers in media and entertainment, we’re already delivering shows in 4K, which has a profound impact on our infrastructure. With data growing what seems exponentially, there are very few platform choices we can trust our data with that can give us the performance confidence of delivering our projects on time. Isilon is agile enough to optimize for many different types of access patterns, which is why it’s our product of choice.”

Sam Grocott, VP of product management and product marketing, EMC Isilon, said: “The Isilon scale-out Data Lake is EMC’s strategy to solve the world’s biggest storage challenge, the growth of unstructured data created by traditional and next-gen applications. This rollout of the new EMC Isilon software, platforms and solutions are designed to help our customers address these challenges while driving faster time to results and reducing costs.”