ACADEMIA

Second Quarter Sets Record with 91 Customers, Bringing Isilon's Rapidly Growing Customer Base to 539; Madison Square Garden, Softbank Technology and United States Army ERDC/TEC Among New Customers: Isilon Systems has announced that its second quarter sales have pushed the company's customer base to 539, demonstrating accelerated enterprise adoption of clustered storage to address the explosive growth of digital content and unstructured data. Isilon announced that Madison Square Garden, Softbank Technology and United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center's Topographic Engineering Center are among 91 new customers Isilon gained in the second quarter of 2007. Isilon has added nearly half of its customer base -- 257 customers -- in just the last nine months. "The rapid growth of Isilon's customer base is a sign of the times, as more and more enterprises adopt clustered storage over traditional storage alternatives to meet the unique requirements of digital content and unstructured data," said Steve Goldman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Isilon Systems. "The fact that customers are voting with their feet underscores that clustered storage is a disruptive new category that will redefine the future of networked storage." Isilon's clustered storage architecture was designed and developed to specifically address the needs of storing, managing and accessing digital content and unstructured data. Isilon's IQ line of clustered storage products enable businesses to create a single, shared pool of storage that can modularly scale up to an unprecedented 1.6 Petabytes of capacity and deliver data throughput of 10 gigabytes per second of performance, achieving 100 times the scalability and 20 times the performance of traditional SAN and NAS systems. As massive amounts of business and consumer information continues to move toward unstructured data and digital content -- audio, video, images, computer models, reference information and other large files -- clustered storage is providing customers with unprecedented levels of "pay as you grow" scalability and performance which is a an absolute requirement to maximize the value of these critical assets. A March 2007 white paper from research firm IDC titled "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010" reports that unstructured data, consisting primarily of digital content, accounts for more than 80 percent of all information within enterprise organizations. During this year alone, almost one-fifth of organizations expect their data storage facilities to double, according to IDC, largely due to the use of graphics-intensive applications across a broad variety of industries -- from neuro-imaging and clinical cancer research analysis in the life sciences industry, to reservoir modeling and simulation among oil and gas companies, to 3D movie production and computer animation in Hollywood. "The first time we performed hands-on analysis of Isilon IQ many moons ago we were blown away by the solution," said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This was when the concept of extensible file systems and true N-way clustered storage was still relatively new in mainstream commercial markets. We interviewed a number of their customers to find out if what we saw in the lab was being experienced in production environments. We found that Isilon customers were even more enthusiastic than we were. Isilon is part of an evolution of storage networking that fundamentally changes the rules. We are witnessing a shift occurring in the data center that has far-reaching implications. Isilon's 500th customer is validation of that 'aha' experience we had several years ago and of their compelling founding vision." Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, Accelerator, and EX 6000 and 9000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.