Isilon NAS Deployed by 3tier

EMC Corporation announced that 3TIER, which helps the global energy industry manage renewable energy risk, has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS as the primary storage platform for its energy assessment and forecasting operations, simplifying big data management to increase application performance and reduce costs.

Using Isilon’s SmartPools software application, 3TIER has unified multiple performance tiers into a single file system, enabling seamless, automated big data migration between tiers to improve operating efficiency and maximize its storage investment.  

"3TIER ingests massive amounts of weather and climate data, and our in-house numerical weather models create still more data," said Paul English, Director of IT at 3TIER. "Transforming all that data into accurate renewable energy assessments and forecasts is a major challenge. To focus on what we do best – building applications to extract insights from the data – we needed to reduce the burden of data management."

"Before Isilon, our team had to do everything from manual data migrations to mapping directory paths, which simply wasn’t sustainable for a business growing as quickly as ours," continued English. "With Isilon, everything is simple. We’ve eliminated data management and storage headaches, freeing up resources to focus on the services that deliver real value to our clients."

Prior to deploying Isilon scale-out NAS, 3TIER’s traditional RAID array couldn’t scale to meet the demands of its big data workflow – complicating management, escalating costs and limiting 3TIER’s ability to grow its customer base. 3TIER needed a scalable storage solution capable of consolidating its assessment and forecasting applications on a single, shared resource, while also enabling significant amounts of data to be presented dynamically to customers online.

By deploying Isilon’s X- and NL-Series in combination with SmartPools, 3TIER created a single file system and point of management for multiple performance tiers, simplifying management to less than one full-time equivalent (FTE) and unifying all of its operations on a single, shared pool of storage. With Isilon’s ‘pay as you grow’ architecture and greater than 80 percent storage utilization, 3TIER can purchase only the storage it needs, while maintaining the flexibility to add more storage as business needs change, minimizing both capital costs and power, cooling and space requirements associated with its storage infrastructure.    

"3TIER is pioneering the use of scalable information systems to manage renewable energy risk, demonstrating yet another way in which big data is helping change the way we live, work and coexist on this planet," said Sam Grocott, Vice President of Marketing at Isilon. "By using Isilon scale-out NAS to simplify big data management and make its own IT infrastructure significantly more efficient, 3TIER is demonstrating the game-changing benefits Isilon delivers for big data environments."