Stepping into the boxing ring, a contest of wit, speed, and strength begins at the sound of the bell. Fans watch to see who will emerge as the victor in the one-on-one matchup. Similar to boxing’s intense competitions, a recent Gartner report identified the contenders in the Scale-Out File Storage industry. In the report, “Critical Capabilities for Scale-Out File System Storage,” EMC received recognition for its Isilon Scale-Out NAS family of products. Isilon rated highest in three of five Use cases: Overall Use Cases (4.17 out of 5), Commercial HPC Use Cases (4.2) and Archiving Use Cases (4.25), highlighting the value of scalability and performance for enterprise workloads.
Gartner measured each scale-out file storage system using criteria in seven different categories including capacity, storage efficiency, interoperability, manageability, performance, resiliency and security and multitenancy. The different categories represent what Gartner believes to be the most important features for customers to evaluate. Capabilities for each category were weighted by importance to their use case.
Gone are the days of managing aggregates and RAID groups. The core software running inside Isilon, OneFS, eliminates the complexity of volume and disk management by handling it all internally in one unified software layer. Gartner recognized Isilon with scores in all seven use cases resulting in the highest rating for the overall use case category. Since acquiring Isilon, EMC has held strong as a frontrunner in the scale-out NAS market by meeting customer needs today and anticipating what they will require tomorrow.
Storage scalability is critical to enterprises today as Big Data continues to snowball thanks to relentless data generation that is growing almost beyond measure. EMC Isilon provides a Data Lake Foundation for traditional file applications and next generation big data analytics, cloud and mobile applications. Some scale-out NAS vendors continue to struggle with how to provide availability, resiliency, and drive protection based on legacy architectures designed for the terabyte world. By contrast, Isilon is architected to provide all of those capabilities in a file system designed from day one to be massively scalable.
The world of scale-out storage is evolving rapidly and new architectures, such as object storage, will emerge as an alternative to on-premise deployments due to the promise of low entry costs, rapid scalability and a growing ecosystem of software and service provider offerings. Customers should be looking to scale-out data lake foundations that can not only support todays enterprise file-based or NAS workloads but can also provide the bridge to next generation cloud deployments and workflows. The best scale-out NAS solutions will bring together the ability to organize massive amounts of data as well as provide insight to make that data actionable via modern analytics frameworks.
A boxing match may take multiple rounds to determine a victor, but in the world of NAS storage, the matchup has already been called. Gartner’s report provides important insight into making the right choice for a scale-out file storage system. Isilon has risen to the top. Find the report here.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
