YRC Worldwide Deploying Isilon

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that YRC Worldwide Inc., one of the world’s largest transportation service providers, has deployed Isilon scale-out storage to help power its supply chain management operations.

Using Isilon’s X-Series, powered by the OneFS operating system, YRC Worldwide has consolidated its VMware-based servers and file-based user shares onto a single file system, simplifying both data and virtual server management. By using Isilon to eliminate the data fragmentation and complex LUN management common with traditional SAN systems in virtualized environments, YRC Worldwide has improved data availability and application performance, while reducing capital and operating costs.    

"As our operations continued to expand, we found our traditional SAN was too complex to efficiently support our virtualized environment and not scalable enough to grow cost-effectively in line with our business," said George Kather, vice president of Technology Services at YRC Worldwide. "By moving to Isilon, we’ve eliminated the complexity and costs of our previous system, while creating a foundation for further consolidation and simplification. With Isilon, virtual server utilization is up, our data is more available and management is simpler."

YRC Worldwide is one of the largest transportation service providers in the world and recent recipient of the 2010 CIO 100 Award for the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in IT. Prior to Isilon, the traditional SAN system at YRC Worldwide complicated virtual server and data management, escalating costs and limiting both resource and data availability. Working with Isilon channel partner NET Source, YRC Worldwide deployed Isilon scale-out storage to consolidate its virtualized environment onto a single, shared pool of storage, enabling seamless data management throughout the supply chain lifecycle, improving application performance and operating efficiency. Additionally, by using Isilon’s SyncIQ software application, YRC Worldwide can replicate data from its primary Isilon cluster to a secondary, off-site cluster for disaster recovery, ensuring its data is online and protected 24x7x365.  

"Not only are they a leader in transportation and supply chain solutions, YRC Worldwide has also been widely recognized as a thought leader in enterprise IT," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "By using Isilon to simplify its virtualized data center, YRC Worldwide is further validating the use of scale-out storage as best practice for virtualized enterprise IT environments."