As a part of our ongoing EMC Isilon building blocks blog series, I want to share my thoughts on EMC Isilon OneFS and why it is still the unparalleled file storage platform available in the market.
IT admins tell me that there is an increasing need for agility and that they need to respond at the speed of business. With the increased deployments of workloads like Cloud, Mobility, Big Data Analytics, and Social, quite often the needs of business change on a dime and IT admins scramble to meet the increasing demands with the limited resources at their disposal. Sounds familiar?
The key to breaking through these challenges lies in the ability to rapidly yet flexibly deliver services via software and not be burdened with slower, cumbersome provisioning of hardware resources. It isn’t just the cost of buying storage – there is also the increasing cost of deploying and managing the storage!
So, now the big question is where does EMC Isilon fit in all of this?
Isilon storage systems depend on just commodity hardware resources like CPU, Memory, NVRAM, Storage, Infiniband, and Ethernet connectivity. I am sure you are now wondering where is all the innovation then? The seventh-generation OneFS software capabilities of data management and data protection define the Scale-out NAS architecture of Isilon storage. A single file system is comprised of a single volume and can scale up to 20PB while policy-driven, software-enabled automation simplifies day-to-day administration. You can start a file system, as low as 18TB, with 3 nodes and provision capacity as you need by adding nodes in under a minute! All this is done transparent to the end user. Yes, it’s that simple! And, don’t forget that we have one of the highest levels of storage utilization with upwards of 80%. Efficiency of storage utilization and software-enabled technologies like deduplication enable you to store more file data in a single cluster. Storing data is one thing but you need software that can efficiently and effectively replicate it, back it up, protect it, secure it, report on it, and analyze it. We do all that in software – and more!
Flexibility with file storage on Isilon is enhanced with multi-protocol data access which I will talk more about in the upcoming blogs. All this is driven by innovations in software as we continue to add more capabilities.
These are exciting times in storing, accessing, retrieving, and managing files at Petabyte scale and Isilon is at the forefront of this! Are you ready to Scale-out with us? Watch this space for more on Scale-Out NAS Architecture next week. And don’t forget to attend the EMC Isilon Keynote at EMC World to see how these blocks come together to deliver business value.
