Isilon Goes Big(ger)

Seventy two terabytes in four rack-units.

Seven hundred and twenty terabytes in a rack.

10 petabytes in 14 racks.

That’s words. How about a picture:

36_NL_FulRack

Remember: At the end of the day this is a single file system and a single name space. Not only that, but my sister could set up this cluster – and her four boys would be the ones racking and stacking. (No offense intended. I’ve just already given some chores to Mom…)

The team in hardware engineering (Osseo, Minnesota, to be exact) tested a lot of 2 TB drives before we found one that would pass our rigorous qualification process. If you don’t believe me, just ask them what the “Dewalt test” is. Isilon uses only the highest quality Enterprise SATA drives in order to keep failure rates as low as possible. It saves us money – and it saves you money too.

Wait… 10 PBs in a single file system? That’s a lot of data and a lot of drives… failures happen, right?

Don’t worry. FlexProtect at +4. That’s right, support for up to four simultaneous failures – nodes and drives – with 100% uptime. Not only that, but we just introduced support for +3:1 which enables the equivalent of RAID-TP for smaller clusters – 3 drives or one node – with the overhead of +1. WOW.

For real offsite disaster recovery you’ll stand up a second cluster and use SyncIQ to replicate, but I won’t judge you if you want to backup to tape.

There isn’t anything a couple dozen Backup Accelerators cannot handle – but we’ll talk about that over beer.

Can anyone else do this? Are there no REAL Scale-Out NAS challengers?

Speak up now!

About the Author: Nick Kirsch