EMC Isilon Delivers Breakthrough Performance For Big Data

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new generations of its EMC Isilon scale-out NAS hardware and software platforms, delivering industry-leading performance, throughput and replication for big data. Isilon's new hardware platform enables customers to choose from a range of drive configurations, including solid state drives (SSD) with either serial attached SCSI (SAS) or serial ATA (SATA) drives, and combine them with a large, globally coherent cache and next-generation quad core processors to deliver optimum price-performance for accelerating big data access. Leveraging these new hardware innovations, Isilon's OneFS 6.5 operating system delivers enhanced enterprise functionality to improve performance for mission-critical data center operations, while Isilon's SyncIQ 3.0 significantly improves recovery point objectives, providing unmatched big data protection.

"Not only has the big data era arrived, but it is already impacting our lives in a variety of ways, from the pursuit of personalized medicine to real-time social networking," said Sam Grocott, Vice President of Marketing, Isilon. "The foundation of this transformational shift is scale-out storage, which delivers the simplicity, scale, and 'pay as you grow' architecture big data requires, while also providing advanced enterprise functionality to ensure seamless integration with a broad range of mainstream IT environments. With these new hardware and software products, Isilon is setting the standard for big data storage, enabling customers to unlock the full potential of their mission-critical information."

"The creation of digital content is expected to eclipse 35 zetabytes by 2020 (a 44x CAGR). IT professionals, however, are growing at a rate of only 1.4x, creating an ever-widening chasm between the amount of information being created and the people available to manage it," said Dave Reinsel, Group Vice President, IDC. "Increasingly, enterprises will need to consider scale-out storage for its ability to simplify management of and accelerate access to their storage in the pursuit of new opportunities."

Isilon's new hardware platform features two product lines optimized to accelerate performance for a range of big data applications:

Nick Bali, Senior Software Engineer with Sony Imageworks, the Academy Award-winning visual effects (VFX) company behind "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Spider-Man" trilogy, beta-tested the S200 and commented:

"We tested Isilon's new S200 in our high-IOPS rendering environment and achieved over 100,000 simultaneous metadata operations, a huge improvement over previous generations. The performance increase is so dramatic, we've already placed an order for these new Isilon nodes, adding to the primary and archive Isilon clusters we already have in production.""Big data represents an unprecedented opportunity for enterprises to extract greater value from their business information, and do so more quickly and collaboratively than ever before," said David Tuhy, General Manager, Intel Storage Group. "The next-generation Isilon S200 and X200 products built with the latest Intel Xeon 5600 processors combine powerful computing with intelligent software to accelerate storage, management and collaboration in the big data era."

With the latest versions of OneFS and SyncIQ, Isilon leverages the hardware advancements of the S200 and X200 to maximum impact with intelligent, automated software that simplifies big data management:

"While testing Isilon's new versions of OneFS and SyncIQ, we witnessed a 2-3x increase in simultaneous processing speeds due to the CIFS enhancements in OneFS, while SyncIQ's use of snapshots significantly improved both the application's efficiency and its performance," said Jonathan Young, Senior Vice President of Operations, Ancestry.com. "With these enhancements, we can deliver client search requests even faster, while using fewer resources to do so."

"With more than six million websites running on our web creation and publishing platform, client data loss is unacceptable," said Chris Fanini, CTO, Weebly. "With the new OneFS and SyncIQ versions, Isilon delivers near real-time data access and replication, ensuring our clients are always protected and our business continues to grow rapidly and without interruption."

"Isilon is an ideal solution for big data, whether its digital media, life sciences or other industries, and its continued innovation ensures we can offer our customers compelling scale-out NAS solutions for accelerating big data performance," said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm.  The Isilon S200 and X200 are both immediately available. The S200 begins at a list price of $57,569 per node and the X200 begins at a list price of $27,450 per node. Isilon's OneFS 6.5 and SyncIQ 3.0 are also both immediately available and free for Isilon customers with an existing support contract. OneFS 6.5 is standard with any S200 or X200 purchase, while SyncIQ has a list price of $4,950 per node.