The topic of flash in the data center is a hot one, and you may have your own views. But to truly get a handle on everything flash can do for you, it helps to understand what’s driving all the excitement. Because there’s more to it than you might realize.
Two things are going on. First, SSDs are replacing spinning disks, increasing reliability and lowering costs while density keeps climbing. Now you can get flash storage that has an 8x higher density than was possible not too long ago. Second, the ongoing data explosion causes storage requirements to nearly double every two years—and 80% of this new data is unstructured.
Increased performance demands from powerful, next-generation applications that use all this unstructured data mean that they too need flash technology. Billions of devices connected to the Internet of Things inundate companies of all sizes with unprecedented amounts of data to which they need fast, secure access. At the same time, innovation has expanded the term “mission-critical” in unforeseen ways. For example, in the media and entertainment sector, the need for lightning-quick access to data has grown enormously as changes in consumer behaviors drive changes in business models.
Now, with the introduction of Isilon All-Flash Scale-Out NAS, you have an unprecedented opportunity to take advantage of flash for all of your critical unstructured data workloads.
Going Beyond Performance
All-flash storage helps address the need for extreme performance. Unfortunately, most all-flash solutions available today are focused on support of block-based data applications, which represent just 20% of most businesses’ data. While some vendors have recently introduced all-flash NAS products, they’re typically early versions that lack the enterprise capabilities organizations need when it comes to data protection, security and management. The Dell Isilon All-Flash solution is different. Very different.
What makes Isilon All-Flash truly unique isn’t hardware — the real difference is the software. Isilon All-Flash runs on the same Isilon OneFS operating system that today powers other Isilon platforms and is used successfully by thousands of organizations around the world. Now in its 8th-generation, Isilon OneFS, and its extensive enterprise capabilities, is the reason Isilon is recognized as the #1 scale-out NAS storage platform in the industry. Isilon All-Flash combines the extreme performance of flash with the massive scalability and other vital enterprise-grade capabilities that organizations need:
- Extreme performance: To support your most demanding unstructured data workloads, Isilon All-Flash delivers up to 250,000 IOPS and 15 GB/s bandwidth per chassis, and a total cluster performance of up to 25M IOPS and 1.5 TB/s bandwidth.
- Massive scalability: With Isilon All-Flash, you can scale storage capacity from 92 TB to 924 TB in a single 4U chassis, and up to 92.4 PB in a single Isilon cluster.
- Operational flexibility: Because Isilon All-Flash is powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system with its extensive multi-protocol capabilities (including NFS, SMB, FTP, HDFS, REST, Swift, and HTTP), you can support a wide range of applications and workloads on a single platform.
- Enterprise data protection: Unstructured data is critical to your business. Isilon All- Flash ensures its integrity and availability with up to N+4 redundancy as well as enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery.
- Robust security: Definitely don’t want to compromise here. Options include role-based access control (RBAC), secure access zones, SEC-compliant write once read many (WORM) data protection, file system auditing, and data encryption.
- Unmatched efficiency: Isilon All-Flash delivers the lowest total cost of data. Storage utilization can exceed 80%, and SmartDedupe can increase effective capacity up to an additional 30%.
Better Economics with Automated Storage Tiering
Another distinct advantage of Isilon All-Flash is the ability to tier data automatically to the most appropriated storage resources. With Isilon SmartPools and CloudPools software, Isilon All-Flash storage solutions can take advantage of policy-based, automated storage tiering to move data automatically to lower-cost tiers—including a choice of cloud storage options—as data ages or becomes less valuable. This enables you to reduce capital expenses and optimize storage resources by reserving Isilon All-Flash storage for your most demanding applications.
Start Your Transformation with Flash Technology for Unstructured Data
You know Dell as the market leader in All-Flash storage and Isilon as the recognized leader in scale-out NAS. Now we’re providing you with the new Isilon All-Flash scale-out NAS storage platform that combines the extreme price/performance advantages of flash technology with the proven efficiency, flexibility and resiliency of Isilon OneFS, the #1 scale-out NAS storage platform in the industry.
Isilon All-Flash will be available in 2017. To receive updates on the launch, visit emc.com/isilon. To pre-order, call your Dell representative today.
