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AppNexus Deploys Clustered Storage to Power Data Center as a Service: Isilon Systems today announced that AppNexus, a pioneer in providing the data center as a service, has deployed Isilon IQ as the primary storage platform powering its next-generation cloud computing operations. AppNexus provides virtual access to enterprise-class infrastructure components in multiple, geographically disparate data centers on a pay-as-you-go, on-demand basis, enabling businesses to deploy and manage high-availability applications quickly, securely, and reliably, without significant investment in physical IT resources. Isilon IQ, which delivers up to 20 Gigabytes per second of performance and 2.3 Petabytes of capacity in a single file system and single volume, provides AppNexus with the unmatched scalability and data availability necessary to effectively manage the rapid data growth and highly concurrent access patterns of its compute cloud. With its virtualized applications unified onto Isilon clustered storage, AppNexus is able to deliver the secure and immediate data access critical to powering its customers' enterprise operations. "Our cloud computing solutions provide enterprise businesses with 24x7x365 access to next-generation data center infrastructure building blocks to increase workflow productivity while significantly reducing IT investment. In such a mission-critical data center environment, we simply cannot afford system downtime or loss of data access due to storage limitations," said Mike Nolet, CTO, AppNexus. "Isilon IQ is the only scale-out storage solution we've seen with the capacity and performance necessary to support enterprise-class cloud computing. With Isilon, we're able to provide the pay-as-you-grow flexibility and immediate data availability our customers require to power their virtual data centers." Cloud computing combines Internet connectivity with virtualized computing principles to create a single, secure, high-performance, highly scalable and highly reliable virtualized data center serving ten, or tens of hundreds, of unique clients. These users are grouped together into one infrastructure, eliminating the need for costly, individual data center investment while leveraging advances in server, network and storage technologies to accelerate data access and improve workflow productivity. AppNexus enables its enterprise customers to run unique operating systems and applications on dedicated, virtualized hardware, allowing server resources to be shared by multiple applications to streamline operations while reducing IT cost and complexity. To power this virtually infinite infrastructure, AppNexus required a storage solution that eliminated the performance and capacity limitations inherent to traditional, scale up storage architectures. With Isilon IQ in each of its two data centers, AppNexus can provide its customers with a single, highly scalable, high performance shared pool of storage to unify their mission-critical file-based information onto a reliable, immediately available central storage repository, accelerating data access and significantly reducing IT overhead. "Cloud computing is the latest evolution of the virtualized, next-generation data center, enabling enterprise businesses to access data and applications from anywhere, at anytime, without the constraints of physical data center resources or budgets," said Steve Fitz, Senior Vice President, Global Field Operations, Isilon Systems. "AppNexus is at the leading-edge of the compute cloud's emergence within the enterprise and its use of Isilon clustered storage is helping create the template for future cloud computing manifestations." Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ X-Series delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of file-based data, setting the standard for scale out file storage. 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 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator-x, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.