Isilon Clustered System Delivers 125% ROI

Isilon Systems revealed the results of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Isilon Systems titled The Total Economic Impact (TEI) of Isilon’s Clustered Storage System. Forrester examined the total economic impact and return on investment (ROI) that enterprises may realize by deploying clustered storage. Forrester conducted a series of in-depth interviews with four organizations currently using Isilon’s clustered storage systems and found that these companies achieved benefits including lower upfront costs, fewer administrative resources, less training and professional services, and cost avoidance of traditional storage media. The Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) of Isilon’s clustered storage system can be accessed at http://www.isilon.com.

The Forrester study concluded that on average, the interviewed Isilon customers achieved the following benefits over traditional storage solutions:

• 97 percent reduction in management resources.
• 22 percent increase in storage utilization which resulted, for an environment of the size used in the study, in a 37 percent decrease in the volume of storage capacity required.

The overall result of these advantages was a risk-adjusted ROI of 125 percent and a payback period within five months.

"In light of current macro economic conditions, enterprise businesses around the globe are taking an even deeper look at return on investment of their IT spending," said Paul Rutherford, CTO, Isilon Systems. "The Forrester study illuminates, in a very tangible way, the real-world business benefits enterprise businesses achieve with Isilon clustered storage."

As part of the study, the four in-depth Isilon customer interviews uncovered that:

• Isilon’s structure allowed for growth and flexibility in a way that traditional storage did not. One interviewed customer revealed that a single business event can generate more than 60 gigabytes of file data; and that tens of thousands of these events have already generated such files. This customer said, "It would have killed us to maintain that data on our older storage system. We wouldn’t have been able to use it."
• All of the interviewed customers found the Isilon implementation to be extremely simple and fast. One customer described the Isilon implementation as "a very pleasurable experience. It took more time to cable the system than to configure it."
• All of the interviewed customers reported using fewer people to manage their storage systems than what they had used previously, or what they estimate they could have used instead of the Isilon product.

Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry’s first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon’s award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.