ESG Oohs & Aahs Over Isilon

Startup Isilon Systems, which this week launched a brand-new digital content storage and announced several big-name customers, now has something else in its corner (see Isilon Launches Media Storage System).

The Seattle-based company, funded to the tune of $25 million, has achieved what founder and CTO Sujal Patel calls validation” for Isilon IQ, its NAS system for digital content (see Isilon Is-a-Rich ).

This putative validation comes from Enterprise Storage Group Inc.'s ESG Lab, which has written a glowing report on Isilon IQ -- to be released next week -- based on its testing.

“We felt it was important to have a third-party analyst come in and prove all the things we were talking about when we made claims about our system,” Patel says. “Everyone’s a doubter until they see it for themselves. Now potential customers can get a sense that ESG validated our claims, so they must be true.”

The ESG report calls Isilon IQ impressive on several fronts. The analyst firm validated Isilon’s claims about installation, integration, management, scaleability, and performance, noting several highlights, which include:

ESG also says Isilon's management tools are intuitive and that the system operated normally during simulated hardware failures. According to the report, "two of the most compelling characteristics about Isilon IQ that ESG Lab experienced firsthand are how easy it is to add storage capacity in a single file image and how well the I/O throughput scaled in a pure sequential streaming environment."

Tony Asaro, an ESG Lab tester, says the most impressive thing was its linear scaleability of performance, and how easy it was to manage. "Those are the aspects that make it unique versus other systems out there," he says.

However, there were some negatives, Asaro says: "It doesn't do snapshots, it doesn't support server-less backups, and it's not tuned for smaller files -- it's more for large files."

And there's always the question of how much relevance these kinds of labs-based tests have in the real world. The report points out that the ESG Lab conducted testing at Isilon's headquarters and did not use Isilon IQ in a production environment. ESG recommends customers do their own evaluations before making buying decisions.

Earlier this week, Isilon announced that Corbis, Paramount Digital Entertainmnet, Digital FilmWorks, ResearchChannel, and the University of Washington Medical Center are using Isilon IQ to store scanned images, audio, video, and other large file types.Isilon also has a partnership with IBM Global Services to provide onsite field service. Isilon IQ pricing starts at $49,950.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch