EMC Isilon Delivers Breakthrough Performance for Big Data

SEATTLE, April 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new generations of its EMC Isilon® scale-out NAS hardware and software platforms, delivering industry-leading performance, throughput and replication for big data. Isilon's new hardware platform enables customers to choose from a range of drive configurations, including solid state drives (SSD) with either serial attached SCSI (SAS) or serial ATA (SATA) drives, and combine them with a large, globally coherent cache and next-generation quad core processors to deliver optimum price-performance for accelerating big data access. Leveraging these new hardware innovations, Isilon's OneFS® 6.5 operating system delivers enhanced enterprise functionality to improve performance for mission-critical data center operations, while Isilon's SyncIQ™ 3.0 significantly improves recovery point objectives, providing unmatched big data protection.

"Not only has the big data era arrived, but it is already impacting our lives in a variety of ways, from the pursuit of personalized medicine to real-time social networking," said Sam Grocott, Vice President of Marketing, Isilon. "The foundation of this transformational shift is scale-out storage, which delivers the simplicity, scale, and 'pay as you grow' architecture big data requires, while also providing advanced enterprise functionality to ensure seamless integration with a broad range of mainstream IT environments. With these new hardware and software products, Isilon is setting the standard for big data storage, enabling customers to unlock the full potential of their mission-critical information."

"The creation of digital content is expected to eclipse 35 zetabytes by 2020 (a 44x CAGR). IT professionals, however, are growing at a rate of only 1.4x, creating an ever-widening chasm between the amount of information being created and the people available to manage it," said Dave Reinsel, Group Vice President, IDC. "Increasingly, enterprises will need to consider scale-out storage for its ability to simplify management of and accelerate access to their storage in the pursuit of new opportunities."

Isilon's new hardware platform features two product lines optimized to accelerate performance for a range of big data applications:

• Isilon S200 -- Delivering over 1.4 million NFS ops and over 85 gigabytes per second (GBps) of aggregate throughput, all from a single file system, the S200 is an ideal solution for accelerating big data access in design and simulation, digital media, financial analysis and high performance computing workflows. Combining Intel's Xeon® 5600 Quad Core processors with STEC SSD and Hitachi SAS drives, as well as 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) front-end networking and 13.8 terabytes (TB) of globally coherent cache, the S200 provides maximum price-performance for big data.
• Isilon X200 -- With more than 30 GBps of aggregate throughput and industry-leading utilization of at least 80 percent, the X200 delivers a cost-efficient balance of throughput and capacity to power big data workflows in cloud computing, life sciences, Internet services and large-scale virtualized environments. Offering a wide range of configuration options, the X200 enables businesses to easily customize their solution to meet their unique workflow requirements, reducing capital expense and maximizing return on investment.

Nick Bali, Senior Software Engineer with Sony Imageworks, the Academy Award®-winning visual effects (VFX) company behind "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Spider-Man" trilogy, beta-tested the S200 and commented:

"We tested Isilon's new S200 in our high-IOPS rendering environment and achieved over 100,000 simultaneous metadata operations, a huge improvement over previous generations. The performance increase is so dramatic, we've already placed an order for these new Isilon nodes, adding to the primary and archive Isilon clusters we already have in production."

"Big data represents an unprecedented opportunity for enterprises to extract greater value from their business information, and do so more quickly and collaboratively than ever before," said David Tuhy, General Manager, Intel Storage Group. "The next-generation Isilon S200 and X200 products built with the latest Intel Xeon 5600 processors combine powerful computing with intelligent software to accelerate storage, management and collaboration in the big data era."

With the latest versions of OneFS and SyncIQ, Isilon leverages the hardware advancements of the S200 and X200 to maximum impact with intelligent, automated software that simplifies big data management:

• OneFS 6.5 -- Isilon's new version of its OneFS operating system, which creates a single file system and single volume scalable to more than 10 petabytes of capacity, features a range of enterprise functionality enhancements, further simplifying big data management and streamlining system interoperability across a broad set of mainstream data center operations.
• SyncIQ 3.0 -- By fully integrating SyncIQ with SnapshotIQ™, Isilon now offers the most efficient scale-out NAS data replication solution available, delivering industry-leading recovery point objectives for big data protection to ensure customers' information is immediately available 24x7x365.  

"While testing Isilon's new versions of OneFS and SyncIQ, we witnessed a 2-3x increase in simultaneous processing speeds due to the CIFS enhancements in OneFS, while SyncIQ's use of snapshots significantly improved both the application's efficiency and its performance," said Jonathan Young, Senior Vice President of Operations, Ancestry.com. "With these enhancements, we can deliver client search requests even faster, while using fewer resources to do so."

"With more than six million websites running on our web creation and publishing platform, client data loss is unacceptable," said Chris Fanini, CTO, Weebly. "With the new OneFS and SyncIQ versions, Isilon delivers near real-time data access and replication, ensuring our clients are always protected and our business continues to grow rapidly and without interruption."

"Isilon is an ideal solution for big data, whether its digital media, life sciences or other industries, and its continued innovation ensures we can offer our customers compelling scale-out NAS solutions for accelerating big data performance," said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm.  

Pricing and Availability

The Isilon S200 and X200 are both immediately available. The S200 begins at a list price of $57,569 per node and the X200 begins at a list price of $27,450 per node. Isilon's OneFS 6.5 and SyncIQ 3.0 are also both immediately available and free for Isilon customers with an existing support contract. OneFS 6.5 is standard with any S200 or X200 purchase, while SyncIQ has a list price of $4,950 per node.

About Isilon

Isilon, a division of EMC, is the global leader in scale-out NAS. We deliver powerful yet simple solutions for enterprises that want to manage their data, not their storage. Isilon's products are simple to install, manage and scale, at any size and, unlike traditional enterprise storage, Isilon stays simple no matter how much storage is added, how much performance is required, or how business needs change in the future. We're challenging enterprises to think differently about their storage, because when they do, they'll recognize there's a better, simpler way.  Learn what we mean at http://www.isilon.com.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

The names of companies mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation