INDUSTRY

Isilon Systems, the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage systems for digital content, announced that its high performance storage system, Isilon IQ, was awarded the Most Promising New Technology by the WSA, Washington State's largest technology trade organization. Isilon IQ was selected because of its truly innovative, unique and disruptive technology, packaged in a breakthrough solution that addresses the challenges companies face in storing and managing exploding amounts of digital content. The WSA awarded Isilon last night at the organization's 9th Annual Industry Achievement Awards ceremony, which celebrates companies that best demonstrate leadership and innovation in the technology sector. WSA President and CEO, Kathy Wilcox, said, "Isilon IQ is a disruptive technology at the forefront of the high-growth storage networking market. Isilon IQ was a natural fit for the award, as it fulfills a crucial and sizeable need in business today and takes an entirely new approach to address the huge wave of digitization that is going on everyday around us." Storage required for digital content will grow seven-fold between 2003 and 2006 to more than 1.2 million terabytes -- 1.2 billion gigabytes -- therefore straining existing storage infrastructures and technologies designed primarily for text-based information. Audio, video, images, graphics and other large files have requirements for which traditional storage systems were not designed, as they consume large amounts of storage capacity, grow much faster than traditional data sets and require high throughput and often high concurrency. With Isilon IQ, companies no longer must retrofit traditional storage systems to attempt to handle digital content, but instead have a solution designed specifically for this explosion in the creation of digital files. Isilon's award-winning Isilon IQ product is designed for data-intensive businesses and high performance computing environments, such as those in media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, and oil and gas. Isilon IQ is already storing and managing more than 200 terabytes of some of the most valuable digital content being created today, including millions of digital photographs, thousands of hours of major motion pictures, television programming for broadcast and the Internet, newsroom graphics, digital music and millions of other large files. Some of Isilon's customers include Paramount, Corbis, Technicolor, FotoKem and the Experience Music Project. "We are off to a great start in 2004 and are honored that the WSA selected Isilon IQ as the most promising new technology," said Sujal Patel, Isilon founder and chief technology officer. "In addition to the power and simplicity of our technology, Isilon IQ delivers bottom-line business benefits to customers by significantly reducing their storage costs, increasing application productivity and enabling them to unlock new revenues from their digital content."