ACADEMIA

EMC announced that the EMC Isilon continues to be the preferred no-compromise scale-out NAS solution of choice for organizations with high performance computing needs. Organizations across a range of industries are turning to Isilon to help them manage and access their most mission-critical data for timely and accurate analysis, leading to new discoveries, faster product development and better business decision-making.

When Digital Globe needed to accelerate the performance of its Big Data-intensive geospatial information services, the company turned to EMC Isilon and significantly improved its data processing capacity and performance, while reducing production times and total cost of storage ownership. As a result, Digital Globe can deliver its fully processed high-resolution images to customers faster and at less cost.

At Columbia University's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Isilon provides the storage foundation for a variety of compute-intensive bioinformatics research initiatives. John Lowell Wofford, director of IT services for C2B2, said, "In this era of Big Data, it's clear that technology plays a critical role in the management and analysis of data for our researchers. I used to worry that our IT system couldn't keep pace with those growing computational demands. But with EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, we no longer have to worry about the scalability of our storage environment. This system is so streamlined and flexible. Improvements of capacity and performance go hand-in-hand with no compromise of one over the other. This technology backbone may help bring a new drug to market faster or enable our researchers to discover a genomic breakthrough."

Also in higher education, the University of Buffalo Center for Computational Research supports hundreds of researchers and academics who have dedicated themselves to innovating in data-intensive industries such as bioinformatics and geohazards. Tony Kew, storage administrator of the Center for Computational Research commented, "We operate 24x7x365, so downtime and performance bottlenecks are simply unacceptable. We support hundreds of researchers with limited IT staff, so we need storage that's simple to manage and easy to scale. Isilon delivers on all fronts, while also providing highly concurrent performance to accelerate our research."

By deploying EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, PetroChina, the publicly-traded arm of China National Petroleum Corporation, has consolidated a variety of mission-critical applications on a single file system and point of management, streamlining Big Data management to accelerate time-to-discovery in oil and gas exploration. Using EMC Isilon, PetroChina can provide its scientists with immediate, highly concurrent access to seismic data and applications, improving collaboration and operating efficiency.

As a provider of comprehensive, end-to-end geospatial solutions, Sanborn processes thousands of images each day. After achieving a more than 500 percent increase in performance over the previous storage system using EMC Isilon, Doyle Heisler, director of IT, said, "At Sanborn, customer demand for our geospatial solutions can simply be described as 'more, better, faster,' with each new project raising the bar in terms of size, complexity and turnaround time. By deploying Isilon IQ, we've increased image processing speeds 5X, enabling us to complete projects in much less time and pursue new business opportunities that would have been impossible without Isilon."

Christopher Angel, IT systems analyst, Canadian Light Source, Inc noted, "With demand continuing to increase for our synchrotron-based research, we needed to move away from the complexity and limitations of our traditional SAN to a simpler, more flexible and cost-effective storage solution. Isilon fit the bill, as it not only simplified management and improved application performance, but its scale-out architecture also ensures we'll never need a forklift upgrade again."

In June, the Isilon S200 scale-out NAS system broke performance records for a single file system as established by the independent Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The Isilon S200 meets growing demands of Big Data with the ability to drive a high number of transactional I/Os with multiple workflows and to conduct multiple protocols in a single file system and single volume. For companies with HPC requirements, this means no more compromise between performance and capacity, and enables them to extract greater value from their business information quickly, collaboratively, and securely.

EMC Isilon is at Supercomputing '11 Conference and representatives are on-hand to discuss how true scale-out NAS dramatically improves data and server performance and accelerates time-to-results in critical HPC projects to extract maximum value from data. EMC Isilon Director of Product Management, Nick Kirsch, will speak about the benefits of true scale-out NAS in a forum entitled "Big Data, Big Opportunity: Maximizing the Value of Data in HPC Environments," on November 15, 10:30 - 11 AM in WSCC Room 613/614.