Surgient Uses Isilon IQ NAS

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that Surgient, provider of self-service provisioning solutions for dynamic data centers, is using Isilon IQ as the primary storage solution for its award-winning Surgient Virtual Automation Platform.

Using Isilon scale-out NAS, Surgient has overcome the costly data fragmentation challenges associated with deploying traditional NAS and SAN in virtualized environments by unifying thousands of virtual servers onto a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage. With Isilon IQ, featuring its OneFS operating system, Surgient has maximized the performance and value of its virtual data center, while requiring less than half of one full-time equivalent (FTE) to manage the entire solution.

"We operate a highly virtualized data center with a broad range of data-intensive applications, so we need a storage solution that can seamlessly scale both performance and capacity," said Evan Watkins, director of operations and quality assurance, Surgient. "We can’t afford to waste valuable resources on the complex data migration necessary with traditional storage in virtualized data centers. With Isilon, we’ve dramatically simplified and accelerated our workflow, enabling us to instantaneously respond to customer demand, while growing our business to acquire new customers at a more rapid pace."

By deploying Isilon scale-out NAS, Surgient has unified its entire data center onto a single file system capable of up to 5 petabytes (PB) of capacity, 1.7 million IOPS of performance, 45 Gigabytes per second (GBps) of aggregate throughput and industry-leading utilization of more than 80 percent. With its IT virtualization and resource automation services consolidated onto a single file system, Surgient has eliminated the data fragmentation and scalability limitations caused by traditional NAS system, streamlining its workflow to maximize operational efficiency. Additionally, Isilon’s unique ability to linearly or independently scale performance and capacity enables Surgient to purchase only the storage they need, while retaining the flexibility to grow their storage system on-demand, resulting in significant cost-savings and optimal business agility.

"It is no longer a question of ‘if’ enterprise businesses will adopt IT virtualization strategies, but ‘when’," said Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing, Isilon Systems. "However, IT virtualization creates data-intensive usage demands that are simply too much for traditional storage systems to effectively manage. With Isilon IQ, virtualization leaders like Surgient can deploy a dynamic, powerful storage solution to dramatically reduce CAPEX and OPEX, while enabling their IT infrastructure to support highly virtualized environments."

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform provides advanced virtualization and private cloud capabilities, automating the delivery of complex IT services to its enterprise customers. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Surgient’s traditional NAS system could not scale performance or capacity to meet workflow demands, resulting in data fragmentation that created an unnecessarily costly and complex IT environment. The limitations of Surgient’s previous NAS system created disparate data silos and hindered system performance, slowing resource allocation for its hosted customers.