Faster I/Os for Isilon Clustered NAS

Isilon Systems announced an 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. With these new products, Isilon brings to market a full range of scale-out NAS solutions, enabling customers to accelerate the productivity of mission-critical applications, workflows and processes through an efficient, easy-to-manage storage infrastructure that reduces capital and operational expenditures while seamlessly scaling in lockstep with business growth.

Leveraging continued innovation of its hardware platform, combined with Isilon’s proven, fifth-generation OneFS operating system software, the new products drive increased performance for a full spectrum of file-based data applications and access patterns – from highest performance, I/O-intensive applications, to primary and secondary storage, to nearline archives – all from a single file system architecture. Isilon’s new S-Series, X-Series and NL-Series products expand the applicability of its leading-edge scale-out NAS solutions within the enterprise and data-intensive vertical markets, enabling businesses to speed time-to-market, eliminate disparate systems and reduce operational costs.

"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," said Sujal 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."

"Even in the face of a challenging macro-economic environment, file-based data continues to accelerate, driven by the rapid data growth in industries such as media and entertainment, life sciences, Internet, and manufacturing," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager, IDC. "To address this progressive shift, enterprise businesses will be best served by deploying systems that deliver simplified file-based data management across storage tiers, as well as efficient utilization of performance and capacity. Today, scale-out NAS solutions meet these criteria and can help organizations increase operational efficiencies and optimize capital expenditures."

IQ 5400S:
Optimized for Highest Transactional/Random I/O Performance
The Isilon IQ 5400S delivers more than 1 million IOPS from a single file system – 10X more than the leading traditional NAS Fiber 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."

IQ 36000X:
Performance, Scalability and Value for Primary Storage
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.

IQ 36NL:
Redefining Economics of Nearline Archiving
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 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 IQ has been an instrumental part of helping us grow a single file system to nearly a petabyte in less than a year, while still maintaining the throughput required to power our workflow and advance our research," said Matthew Trunnell, manager of research computing, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Pricing and Availability
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.