Isilon Taps the Accelerator

Trying to get the jump on Network Appliance's upcoming clustered NAS, Isilon today rolled out a performance accelerator and a capacity expansion node for its IQ storage platform. (See Isilon Distributes New Clusters.)

Isilon was among the early vendors to sell distributed file systems that cater to industries demanding high throughput, such as digital broadcasting and oil and gas exploration. (See Energy Firms Clamor for Clusters, Storage Shapes Up for Multimedia, and Next-Gen File Systems.) Another early player in the field, Spinnaker, was gobbled up by NetApp in late 2003, and NetApp expects to ship an operating system built on that technology later this year. (See NetApp Nudges Closer to New OS and NetApp Annexes Spinnaker.)

Isilon, which could feel the brunt once NetApp fully integrates its Spinnaker software, moved to strengthen its product line with the Isilon IQ Accelerator and the EX 6000. The IQ Accelerator is a controller without disk, aimed at speeding performance if a customer doesn't want to add capacity. The EX 6000 is for shops that want to go the other way; they can add 6 Tbytes per expansion node without adding processing power.

Isilon also upgraded its OneFS distributed file system, which runs on all of its storage systems. OneFS adjusts the size of the cluster and file system as customers add nodes, and supports up to 528 Tbytes of capacity and 7 Gbytes per second of performance. That's up from 256 Tbytes and 3 Gbytes/s from the previous OneFS version.

"Customers are always pushing us to go larger and larger," says Isilon CTO Sujal Patel. "And faster."But it's not necessarily the same customers pushing both. That's why Isilon decided to allow customers to either add performance or capacity. In the past, customers had to add processing power and capacity in the same node.

"That was one of their weak points -- you had to buy storage and throughput at the same time and couldn't grow it independently," says Saker Klippsten, head of engineering for special effects shop Zoic Studios. "Now they're allowing you to grow throughput independent of the storage."

Zoic was among Isilon's first customers, buying 7 TBytes of storage in 2003 and growing to more than 100 Tbytes. Zoic was a beta customer for the IQ Accelerator, running five of the nodes with a cluster of IQStor 1920 systems. The studio has 1,200 workstations accessing Isilon storage systems and will take all the throughput it can get.

"In the visual effects industry, we push things to the limit," Klippsten says. "We're storage people's worst nightmare. We demand the highest throughput, because we throw so many reads and writes at the servers."

His verdict on the IQ Accelerator? "It's amazing to see how much more throughput you can get than using one of the accelerate nodes with storage."Klippsetn says Zoic has tested systems from NetApp, BlueArc, and Silicon Graphics either before or after purchasing Isilon, and briefly ran a PolyServe clustered file system before removing it because of poor performance. So while he's happy with Isilon now, he intends to keep testing it against all comers. And that includes the NetApp Spinnaker systems when they are available.

"I wouldn't say we are loyal to one company," he says. "It's whoever has the fastest stuff."

If there's another issue that would test his loyalty to Isilon, it's the inability to use it with other vendors' storage. Zoic also maintains a DataDirect Networks system to handle islands of storage from Avid and other servers it runs. It would be cheaper and easier if he could connect everything to Isilon.

"I would like to hang other storage off [Isilon] accelerator nodes," Klippsten says. "Put in a Fibre Channel card and carve up storage any way you want. I don't know if that's on their roadmap."

Pricing for the IQ Accelerator is $13,000. The EX 6000 starts at $24,600 for a 6 Tbyte node.Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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