Isilon Snaps Its Clusters

Isilon's making clustered storage a bigger part of NAS instead of a specialty for those who work with large-file applications.

Vendors have come at this from different directins. Enterprise NAS leaders Network Appliance and EMC have added support for clustered files systems, NetApp through integration of software it acquired from Spinnaker, and EMC through a partnership with Ibrix. (See Ibrix Joins EMC Select and NetApp's GX Targets HPC.)

Exanet is building continuous data protection (CDP) into its clustered file system. (See Exanet Dips Toe in CDP Pool.) And today Isilon beefed up its software capabilities for its Isilon IQ clustered storage systems. (See Isilon Updates Software.) Enhancements include:

Offering these kinds of data protection is a necessity for clustered file systems to move beyond vertical markets where they've made most of their headway -- broadcasting, life sciences, gas exploration, and Internet firms. This is proving a tougher challenge than expected, though. For instance, NetApp left out many data protection features from its core operating system in the first cut of Data OnTap GX based on the Spinnaker technology. And the Ibrix software that EMC offers for clusters still lacks generally available snapshot support, although it has it it available in beta.

"These applications are tough to build on clustered storage," Isilon founder and CTO Sujal Patel says. But NAS customers agree these capabilities are necessary to make clustered file systems mainstream.Kelly Carpenter, senior technical manager at the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University at St. Louis, is running NAS systems from NetApp and BlueArc. He's looked at clustered systems from Ibrix and Crosswalks but hasn't taken the plunge largely because of the lack of what he calls the "cool stuff."

"If you want to be enterprise ready, people are going to assume you have those functions," he says. "If I can't do things like snapshots and replication, I lose all the cool functionality. Eventually, everybody's going to have those capabilities. Eventually better be soon, especially for snapshots. That's probably the biggest one."

Then again, the traditional clustered storage customers also find snapshots useful. David Kirchhoff, IT manager at Brigham Exploration says he gets the most immediate benefit from snapshots after beta testing Isilon's new software. An Isilon customer since last November, Brigham uses Isilon to crunch seismic data. Kirchhoff decided to purchase SnapshotIQ while pondering SmartConnect. He'll upgrade to OneFS 4.5 but his cluster isn't big enough to go to N+3 or N+4 configurations.

Kirchhoff had been using Windows 2003's Shadow Copy but prefers Isilon's snapshots. "This is so much easier to use," he says. "We can set up different schedules and different expirations for different directories within a cluster. We'll give users the ability to roll back to snaps, since it's easy to use."

Like most of its rivals, Isilon charges extra license fees for the new capabilities. SnapshotIQ costs $2,950 per node and SmartConnect is $4,950 per node.Analyst Brad O'Neill of the Taneja Group says the new software capabilities show Isilon is committed to becoming an enterprise play as it prepares to go public, but it still has a way to go to match the market leaders. (See Isilon Reveals IPO Plans.)

"Having snapshots is an absolute prerequisite to doing mission-critical enterprise applications, as is failover and data protection," O'Neill says. "They're saying, 'We view ourselves as a viable alternative to NetApp...soon.'"

What's missing? O'Neill says Isilon needs advanced replication and archival capabilities. But the bottom line might turn out to be performance.

"The main issue for Isilon in the enterprise will have less to do with the software capabilities, which are now well in hand, and more to do with the demonstrable performance of OneFS for transactional workloads," he says. "If they can prove that they can handle dynamic workloads, then Isilon is a very real player in NAS."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: