Isilon Releases New Clustered Storage Systems Targeting Virtualized Data Center and Nearline Archive Markets

Isilon Systems announced the release of the Isilon IQ 12000 and EX 12000 products, delivering the industry’s first and only production-ready storage system to scale to more than 1.6 Petabytes of capacity in a single file system and single volume, achieving scalability levels 100 times that of traditional SAN and NAS storage systems. The Isilon IQ 12000 and EX 12000 deliver the breakthrough benefits of clustered storage – high performance data access, “pay as you grow” modular scalability and unmatched ease of use – in a powerful and economical solution for the near-line archiving market. These new, highest density systems further extend Isilon’s clustered storage platform, which is standing at the forefront of the enterprise shift to virtualized data centers based upon clustered and server virtualization.

“For years, the complexity of traditional storage has hindered workflow efficiency and created costly bottlenecks in enterprise operations, relegating IT to a business’s overhead costs,” said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. “However, in today’s enterprise, the virtual data center – with its dramatic ease of use, cost-efficiency and performance – is absolutely necessary to turn the opportunities of today into the breakthroughs of tomorrow. To satisfy this business imperative, Isilon’s clustered storage systems create a single, highly scalable, high performance, shared pool of storage, delivering a truly clustered and virtualized storage solution to transform IT from business overhead to strategic weapon.”

Isilon also today announced that the Taneja Group has published a new white paper entitled Clustered Computing Architectures Fuel the Need for Clustered Storage. (Available at www.isilon.com) In this white paper, the Taneja Group details how the shift to clustered computing architectures and applications in the enterprise is driving the demand for clustered storage systems and highlights Isilon IQ as an ideal solution to meet this burgeoning demand.

“We are witnessing the emergence of clustered architectures at both the server and storage level, driving a symbiotic relationship between clustered server computing and clustered storage which will have profound ramifications on storage system design and end user purchasing patterns in the future,” said Steve Norall, Senior Analyst, Taneja Group. “Today, clustered storage is making the leap with these clustered applications into the heart of the data center. Isilon recognized this transformation early on and has designed and developed a clustered file storage system to take advantage of this transformation.”

Isilon IQ 12000 and EX 12000 deliver following benefits:
•     Scalability – Leveraging Isilon’s OneFS operating system software in combination with 1 Terabyte Hitachi drives, the Isilon IQ 12000 and EX 12000 deliver modular, “pay as you grow,” scaling of capacity to more than 1.6 Petabytes in a single file system and single volume. Additionally, the IQ 12000 and EX 12000 feature unmatched product density, packing 12 TB of storage into a 2U form factor. With these highest density systems, enterprise customers can create a 250 TB Isilon IQ cluster in a single data center rack, enabling these businesses to dramatically reduce total cost of ownership.

•     Performance – Isilon IQ clustered storage leverages Isilon’s OneFS operating system software to utilize both the CPU performance and disk-drive capacity of each IQ node, scaling performance in lock-step with capacity and eliminating the performance bottlenecks inherent in traditional SAN and NAS storage environments. With the IQ 12000, enterprise customers actually gain performance as they add capacity – a linear scalability impossible with traditional systems – delivering best-in-class performance benefits unmatched in the near-line archive market and uniquely enabling businesses to meet the massive data growth and access demands that are now commonplace in today’s digital world.

•     Ease of Use – Powered by Isilon’s OneFS operating system software, the Isilon IQ 12000 and EX 12000 provide a single file system and single volume, delivering a highly scalable, single shared pool of storage for meeting the rigorous demands of rapidly growing digital content and unstructured data stores. Isilon IQ delivers a single point of management for this entire storage system, providing unmatched simplicity in system configuration and management, while significantly reducing IT costs and staff requirements.

•     Reliability – Utilizing OneFS’s data protection software and clustered storage architecture, customers can rest assured that their data will always be protected, even when utilizing the largest disc drives in the industry. FlexProtect-AP software enables customers to protect their data up to N+4, meaning the cluster can withstand up to four simultaneous failures and never lose access to data. Furthermore, when drives do fail, OneFS can rebuild a 1TB drive in less than 3 hours, an unmatched drive rebuild time that is only possible with Isilon IQ’s clustered storage architecture – no other storage system on the market offers these breakthrough data protection capabilities.

The Isilon IQ 12000 platform node and Isilon EX 12000 platform extension node each contain 12 Hitachi 1TB SATA-II disk drives, providing 12TB of capacity in each 2U node. The IQ 12000, leveraging Isilon’s OneFS operating system software, provides linear scaling of both capacity and performance with the addition of each modular 2U node. The EX 12000, when paired with the Isilon IQ 12000, provides scaling of capacity independent of performance to achieve unmatched value for storing and accessing large and rapidly growing archives of unstructured data and digital content. Furthermore, these new systems can be added to existing Isilon IQ clusters, demonstrating the flexibility and future proof capabilities that Isilon clustered storage delivers.
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