Next Gen of EMC Isilon Scale-out NAS Data Lake

EMC Corpration announced the next generation of its Isilon Scale-out NAS Data Lake, which includes new products, features and capabilities that allow enterprises to scale to edge locations as well as to public clouds.

The IsilonSD Edge, next generation of Isilon OneFS and Isilon CloudPools – enhance the Data Lake by allowing unstructured data to be available not only within the core data center, but also at data center edge locations such as remote offices and archived in the cloud. Designed to offer a more efficient Data Lake, the new Isilon solutions consolidate multiple workloads and allow users to access and analyze data from all locations.

Three major trends are transforming the enterprise. First, enterprises are becoming more global with a distributed workforce. Second, the volume of unstructured data is growing rapidly and doubling every two years, increasing the need for managing data efficiently while also garnering value from it. Lastly, hybrid cloud has become the preeminent choice for customers to most efficiently and effectively run their data centers.

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Data Lake 2.0 strategy and announcements are at the heart of managing these challenges. Early Data Lake deployments were limited to pulling in only data sources available within – or in close proximity to – the core data center. Now there is an increasing need for the Data Lake 2.0 to expand and be able to manage unstructured data in a simple and consistent way within the core data center, at edge locations and in the cloud.

Delivering Software-Defined Edge Storage
IsilonSD Edge is a software-defined solution designed to simplify data management in remote offices, or edge locations, in a cost-efficient way. Edge locations have historically had challenges with cost, low capacity, management complexity, conflicting formats and spotty governance. This has impacted the productivity of information workers in these locations, as well as IT’s ability to view and manage data. IsilonSD Edge is a 100% software-defined offering that runs on commodity hardware. IsilonSD Edge will support Vmware, Inc.‘ ESX and be fully integrated with VMware vCenter for ease of management. IsilonSD Edge sacrifices none of the capabilities of the OneFS OS and will support OneFS’s data services and protocols while scaling up to 36TB, seamlessly replicating data to and distributing it from the core. IsilonSD Edge will be free for non-production use and licensed per cluster for production use.

Optimizing core with next generation of ONEFS
In addition to extending the Data Lake to edge locations, the company is enhancing the Data Lake at the core through the new, next-generation Isilon OneFS OS. This offering is designed to improve resiliency, simplify management, raise efficiency and provide continuous operations for massive Data Lakes. A key enhancement is full Non-Disruptive Upgrade (NDU) support. OneFS has supported NDU for minor code families, and now works across major code families enhancing the resiliency of the Data Lake. The more resilient Data Lake will help ensure no downtime for users and application workloads during major upgrades.

The next generation of OneFS features flexible software upgrade rollback capabilities that will allow customers to restore their application or end-user environments to a pre-upgrade state as required. These capabilities offer infrastructure managers granular choices to ensure a smooth user experience and continued uptime for critical environments.

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Extending to the cloud with CloudPools in addition to solutions focused on the core and edge, the company is offering CloudPools, a new software application for the Isilon product line that will allow Isilon to extend to public, private and hybrid clouds. Much of all data within the enterprise is ‘cold data’ – data rarely in use – that needs to be retained for regulatory and compliance purposes. CloudPools will allow Isilon to tier data natively to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream without requiring a cloud gateway. CloudPools also enables data center expansion to company’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) and Isilon as a private cloud. Isilon extends its core namespace to the cloud to ensure access to data, regardless of location. When the data is tiered to the cloud, it is encrypted in transit and compressed to ensure security of enterprise data at rest in the cloud. This allows organizations to extend their Data Lakes to tap into cloud-scale capacity while ensuring consistent and simplified access to and management of the data.

IsilonSD Edge, next generation of Isilon OneFS and Isilon CloudPools, will be available in early 2016.

“The end-to-end toolset and technology from EMC Isilon enables us to manage the lifecycle of the data much more efficiently and cost effectively. In this age of explosive data growth and a global workforce, storage technology that spans the ever-expanding data center to grant access to our data anytime, from anywhere is critical-and Isilon delivers that with ease,” said Andy Nallappan, CIO, Avago Technologies Limited.

“We know that unstructured data is growing rapidly and enterprises are challenged to store and manage it on-premises. With EMC Isilon, enterprise customers can use EMC CloudPools to seamlessly tier their frozen data to Microsoft Azure without any disruption to users and applications. By leveraging the durability, scalability, HA and trustworthiness of Microsoft Azure storage, EMC Isilon customers can lower the overall cost of their storage,” said Guru Pangal, GM, hybrid storage and data protection, Microsoft Corporation.

“Customers deploying the new EMC Isilon CloudPools capability will now be able to seamlessly extend to the public cloud. We believe that the combination of Virtustream and EMC Isilon’s CloudPools ensure that enterprise customers can achieve their hybrid cloud goals. We are excited to extend our class leading service offerings to EMC’s Isilon customers as part of an overall Data Lake 2.0 strategy, and see opportunities for dramatic growth as customers shift focus to cloud services,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO, Virtustream, Inc.

“The improved intelligence that comes from using our New IP Architecture to replicate multiple IsilonSD Edge back to a central core, resulting in an expanded, richer, data pool for analytics, could provide us with a competitive edge,” said Jed Bless, senior director, solutions marketing, Brocade Communication Systems, Inc.

“With the world’s unstructured data growing at an unprecedented rate, IT organizations are under immense pressure to deliver more effective strategies for reducing costs, simplifying management and finding ways to consolidate enterprise data sources that can be mined for business intelligence and value. EMC is responding to this shift as one of the few vendors to champion Data Lake architectures and are now rolling out solutions capable of more easily harnessing unstructured data sources that until now have been trapped inside silos at the enterprise edge,” said Scott Sinclair, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

“The rapid growth of unstructured data in the data center core and at the enterprise edge is challenging organizations to both manage data growth and find new ways to tap highly distributed data stores for business intelligence and value. At the same time, the pressure is still on to keep costs down. This trio of new EMC Isilon solutions is designed to optimize every part of the data center, provide a seamless user experience and create new economics as customers continue to wrangle mountains of data and evolve their big data strategies,” said CJ Desai, president, emerging technologies division, EMC.

Resources:
Isilon Launch event resource center (lot of video)
IsilonSD Edge software: Expanding Data Lake to the Edge (video)
The Journey to CloudPools, IsilonSD Edge, and OneFS.NEXT (video)