WOW. I can’t believe it’s almost been a year since Isilon joined the EMC family. Where does the time go?!
Actually, I can tell you where it went, at least in Isilon’s case. Since last December, when our merger with EMC became official, we’ve been working hard to deliver the industry’s best scale-out NAS solutions to existing and new customers, exceed EMC’s revenue expectations for us, raise our profile at important industry events, release new products, partner with tech giants, break speed records, and settle into our new digs. Just to name a few things…
Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been up to in the last year:
- Exceeding financial expectations. EMC’s Big Data solutions, which include Isilon, EMC Atmos and EMC Greenplum, have more than doubled in revenues year over year in the second quarter and third quarter of 2011.
- Great new customers. Since last December, we’ve announced 14 of the hundreds of new customers we’ve acquired in 2012, all of them doing important and downright amazing work. Just two examples: Our technology is helping the Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration identify ideal landing sites on the Moon. And we’re enabling animators at LAIKA, the studio behind the Oscar-nominated animated film Coraline, to spend more time on creative work and less time waiting for huge rendering jobs to finish.
During 2011, Isilon played an increasingly important role in gene sequencing, petroleum research and exploration, renewable energy research, and cloud computing services. And pretty soon, you’ll be hearing about new customers in sectors we’re just beginning to play in, like the automotive industry.
- Introducing new products. Along with our new 108NL scale-out NAS hardware, we announced new generations of products to deliver amazing Big Data performance: our Isilon S200 and X200 nodes; version 6.5 of our OneFS operating system; and version 3.0 of SyncIQ (the industry’s only scale-out replication solution).
- Partnering with tech leaders. In 2011, EMC Isilon joined forces with Cisco, because Big Data needs a Really Big Network, andAdobe Systems, to give media/broadcast customers a top-notch video production system that integrates Adobe’s software with our hardware.
- Breaking performance test records. Our S200 scale-out NAS system became the new industry performance leader, based on independent benchmark measurements from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. SPEC’s testing data measures networked file performance and overall response times and found that the S200 delivered more than doubled the performance of our competitors.
- Raising our profile. At this year’s EMC World in Vegas, our CEO Sujal Patel kicked things off with big news: the announcement of our new 108NL scale-out NAS hardware product, which can scale all the way to a whopping 15.5 petabytes, Its the world’s largest single file system and single volume (not braggin’, just sayin’)!
At EMC World, we hosted the first EMC Big Data Storage Summit. The summit explored new perspectives and challenge current theories on how to extract the most value from the world’s data. We also talked about how to help data scientists with the tools, education and resources they need to succeed and how we can use Big Data to make a difference in our world.
Our CTO Paul Rutherford shared his ideas about unlocking Big Data’s full potential at theGartner Data Center Conference. And at this year’s biggest high performance computing conference, Supercomputing ’11, I gave astanding-room-only talkabout how scale-out NAS can help organizations manage their Big Data efficiently.
- Moving into a new HQ. Two months ago, we packed up andmoved to Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Why? We needed space for the extra 200 employees we’ll be hiring (not to mention for the huge flat-screen TV and barista service in our new employee café).
It was an awesome year for us—and we hope for you as well. As 2011 appears in our collective rear-view mirrors, let’s all take a moment to be grateful for what we learned and accomplished. And then, let’s shift our focus to 2012 and the road ahead. Here’s to a year full of big dreams, big ideas, big achievements, and, of course, Big Data!
Happy Holidays to all!
