Isilon Sets Sights on High-End Clusters

Isilon has bulked up its clustered NAS and SAN systems, unveiling its 12-Tbyte IQ 12000 device earlier today in an attempt to push its wares into virtualized data centers and the nearline archiving market.

The vendor is using 1-Tbyte drives from Hitachi to push the IQ 12000's capacity up to the 12-Tbyte mark, surpassing the 9 Tbytes offered on the firm's previous high-end system, the IQ 9000.

Isilon, which recently swapped its CEO and changed its CFO in an attempt to steady its corporate ship, is eager to expand its presence in the high-end clustering market, where it faces stiff competition from NetApp and EMC.

With the launch of the IQ 12000, Isilon claims to have pushed the envelope for clustered file systems in a clear attempt to steal a march on the competition.

"The largest cluster that we have configured today is 96 nodes -- that's a 1.6 Pbyte volume file system," says Brett Goodwin, Isilon's vice president of marketing and business development, explaining that the system is aimed at data intensive industries such as manufacturing, life sciences, and the telco sector.The last few months have certainly been tough for Isilon, which went public late last year, then failed to keep its momentum going.

Despite its promise to break even sometime this year, the plan hasn't panned out. After a rocky first quarter, Isilon was also hit by losses in the second quarter, which it attributed to deal slippage and the need to ramp up its sales training.

Last month, the vendor was forced to lower its preliminary third-quarter results, citing weaknesses in its European business and tight wallets at key customer Kodak.

Shrewdly, Isilon is also jumping on the green storage bandwagon in an attempt to turn its fortunes around.

Because the IQ 12000 uses the same two-rack unit high chassis as its predecessor, the vendor is touting major power benefits compared to the IQ 9000. "The 12000 requires no additional power and cooling than the 9000, so you're getting a 25 percent improvement in your power and cooling per Tbyte," says Goodwin.The exec would not reveal how many firms are early adopters of the IQ 12000, although he did confirm that the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and entertainment company Starz are using the technology. "There are customers in Japan and North America using this," he says.

Isilon also launched a stripped-down version of the IQ 12000 today, the EX 12000, which contains just 12 Tbytes of disk, but no CPU and no memory. "You connect the EX 12000 to the IQ 12000 to create a 24-Tbyte, two-node cluster," explains Goodwin.

The base level configuration for an 1Q 12000 is a five-node cluster, priced from $120,000. Pricing for a five-node EX 12000 cluster starts at $80,000.

Both devices are available now.

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