In November 2015, EMC announced the upcoming release of new Isilon products to help organizations expand their data lake to enterprise edge locations and the cloud while strengthening it at the core data center. We’re now very pleased to report the immediate availability of IsilonSD Edge, Isilon OneFS 8.0 (formerly OneFS.NEXT), and Isilon CloudPools. Together, these products can transform the way your organization stores and uses data—whether at the edge, the core or the cloud – by harnessing the power of the data lake.
A data lake based on EMC Isilon scale-out NAS offers a number of important advantages: With it, organizations can consolidate file-based, unstructured data, eliminate costly storage silos, simplify management, increase data protection, and gain more value from their data assets. Leveraging built-in multi-protocol capabilities, Isilon supports a wide range of applications and workloads on a single platform—including data analytics that can be used to gain better insight and identify new opportunities for organizations to accelerate their business.
Start at the Core
A great place to begin your journey to the data lake is at your core data center. If your organization has not already done so, you’ll want to contact your EMC representative or authorized reseller about consolidating your unstructured data with Isilon storage. They’ll also be able to describe key Isilon advantages including:
- Simplified management: Single file system, single volume, global namespace
- Massively scalable: Scales from 16 TB to over 50 PB in a single cluster
- Unmatched efficiency: Over 80% storage utilization with automated tiering and data deduplication options
- Enterprise data protection: Efficient backup and disaster recovery, and N+1 thru N+4 redundancy
- Robust security and compliance options: RBAC, Access Zones, WORM data security, File System Auditing, Data At Rest Encryption with SEDs, STIG hardening, CAC/PIV Smartcard authentication, FIPS OpenSSL support
- Operational flexibility: Multi-protocol support including NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP and HDFS, Object and Cloud computing including OpenStack Swift
If you’re already using Isilon, then you’ll want to take advantage of the new Isilon OneFS 8.0 operating system which extends these benefits by providing enterprise-grade, continuous data center service and non-disruptive upgrade capabilities. It also enables you to extend your data lake to edge locations and the cloud. You may also download the new EMC Isilon OneFS 8.0 Simulator at no charge for non-production use so that you and your team can create a simulated environment and get a feel for the interface and administration tasks available in the latest Isilon software release.
Extend to the Edge
If your organization has a network of edge locations – including remote and branch offices – that produce and store data locally, your next destination on your data lake journey probably should be the edge. Our research shows that for most organizations, data at edge locations is growing and they are often inefficient islands of storage, running with limited IT resources and inconsistent data protection practices. Data at the edge is also typically outside of the business data lake, making it difficult to incorporate into data analytics projects.
EMC IsilonSD Edge addresses these challenges with a Software-Defined Storage solution that combines the power of Isilon scale-out NAS with the economy of industry standard hardware in a VMware ESX environment. IsilonSD Edge simplifies management at the edge while providing up to 36 TB of storage capacity per installation. It also allows you to consolidate edge data to the core and thereby extend the data lake to the edge. It also increases data protection by automatically replicating data to the core.
IsilonSD Edge is now available in two versions—a ‘free and frictionless’ download for non-production, trial use, and a licensed version for production use which can be obtained through your EMC representative, authorized reseller or the EMC Store.
Integrate with the Cloud
Nearly all businesses today want to leverage the cloud to cut costs, simplify IT management, and gain virtually limitless storage capacity. But the question for many is how to integrate their on premise storage infrastructure with the cloud. Isilon CloudPools software lets you address rapid data growth and optimize data center storage resources by using the cloud as a highly economical storage tier with massive storage capacity for cold or frozen data that is rarely used or accessed. It also allows you to select from a number of public cloud services or use a private cloud based on EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) or other EMC alternatives.
Isilon CloudPools uses policy-based, automated tiering that enables you to seamlessly integrate with the cloud as an additional storage tier from the Isilon cluster at your core data center. This enables more valuable on-premise storage resources to be used for more active data and applications. To secure data that is archived in the cloud, CloudPools encrypts data that is transmitted from the Isilon cluster at the core data center to the cloud storage service. This data remains encrypted in the cloud until it is retrieved and returned to the Isilon cluster at the data center.
We look forward to hearing about your own journey to the data lake!
