STORAGE

Isilon Systems, the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage, announced the next generation of its award-winning Isilon IQ clustered storage family -- the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 storage systems and the newest version of its award-winning OneFS distributed file system software. With its latest storage systems, Isilon delivers a number of innovations to the market and sets new industry standards for performance, scalability, ease of use and reliability. Isilon IQ is the first clustered storage system to scale to more than 150 terabytes of capacity, deliver three gigabytes/second from a single file system, and support high-performance InfiniBand for low-latency, high-bandwidth intracluster communication. "Three macro trends are driving the need for intelligent clustered storage systems -- the avalanche of digital content being created, a fundamental technology paradigm shift to clustered computing architectures and the strong desire to pair industry standard hardware with smart software to achieve cost savings and performance advantages," said Sujal Patel, co-founder and chief technology officer for Isilon Systems. "Isilon sits at the nexus of these major trends and the release of our new products represents our passion and complete focus on delivering significant business and workflow benefits to our customers." Strong Support from Technology Industry Leaders and Customers Isilon also announced today that a rich ecosystem of industry technology companies including Maxtor Corporation, Mellanox and Topspin are working with Isilon in its efforts to ensure that enterprise companies get unprecedented scalability, performance and reliability from storage systems based on Intel architecture. In addition, customers such as Kodak EasyShare Gallery (formerly Ofoto), oil and gas discovery company Kelman Technologies, Rhythm and Hues, Digital Dimensions and ZOIC Studios are already using Isilon's newest storage systems and are experiencing significant benefits that include higher performance, ease of use, scalability, reliability, consistent throughput, faster data processing and the ability to react more quickly to new business opportunities. Groundbreaking Storage Sets Stage for Industry Revolution The Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 are the first clustered storage systems to offer low-latency, high-performance InfiniBand Architecture-based communications as an option for intracluster connectivity without requiring any changes to a customer's existing IT environment. With 1.9 to 4.8 terabytes of self contained storage per 2U node, the new Isilon IQ products further extend Isilon's industry leading storage density, while offering a single level of management for clusters that can seamlessly scale from four to 168 terabytes of capacity in a single file system. Additionally, with advanced data protection and sophisticated self-healing technologies such as FlexProtect-AP, Isilon's OneFS distributed file system software provides unsurpassed, enterprise-class reliability that ensures that all data is fully accessible even in the unlikely event of multiple hardware failures -- including multiple disks or nodes in a cluster. Isilon's combination of intelligent software, unprecedented ease of use and industry standard hardware has created a revolution that allows customers to dramatically reduce costs, improve reliability and manage huge amounts of storage with unprecedented ease. Once racked, a 10, 50 or 100-terabyte Isilon IQ cluster can be setup in less than 30 minutes, and capacity and performance can be expanded on the fly in less than 60 seconds. This modular architecture enables a new "pay as you grow" model for storage that lowers acquisition costs and drastically reduces total cost of ownership. "Isilon IQ now supports a single NAS system with up to 168 terabytes of capacity in one file system while maintaining performance and data integrity," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. "This kind of scalability addresses the enormous and rapid growth of digital content without putting a burden on the customer in terms of cost or complexity. ESG believes that clustered network storage is an evolution over traditional storage systems and will be a core infrastructure for grid storage." "This is an example of a company taking full advantage of the capabilities of the InfiniBand architecture, which enables low-latency, high-bandwidth intracluster communication found in Isilon's products," said Jim Pappas, director of initiatives of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. Next Generation Clustered Storage Systems Offer Industry Firsts With the introduction of the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 products, Isilon has pioneered many new features for the clustered storage industry including: -- First enterprise clustered storage system to support more than 150TB in a single file system. -- First storage system to deliver more than three gigabytes/second from a single file system. -- Only clustered storage system to support InfiniBand for intracluster communication without requiring changes to existing IT infrastructure. -- Uses the 3.2 GHz Intel Xeon high performance server processors with advanced Intel E7520 chipset for its performance and advanced I/O capabilities. -- First network clustered storage system to offer SmartConnect connection load balancing for users and applications using standard Gigabit Ethernet networking. -- Only clustered storage system to support N+2 data protection that ensures all data remains available even in the unlikely event of multiple, simultaneous hardware failures. -- The only storage system to support 250GB Serial ATA (SATA) drive rebuild times in as little as one hour. -- Only storage system that can scale capacity, performance and throughput in less than 60 seconds with no downtime. The Isilon IQ 1920 and 3000 have been deployed in the most demanding customer environments and will be generally available in April, with the Isilon IQ 4800 generally available in June. Entry prices for these systems range from one cent to 1.5 cents per megabyte with no additional cost for high-performance InfiniBand. Industry Customer Support "We were very impressed on all fronts with the Isilon solution during the beta phase. We were sold on their smart approach to file sequence access and InfiniBand technology, so we used it in production immediately. Isilon IQ's ease of use, performance, scalability and reliability were far and above the competing solutions from companies we evaluated. Isilon's clustered approach has pushed our overall aggregate network bandwidth 10 times higher than our previous solution. With the unique capabilities of SmartConnect client load balancing and InfiniBand support, we have been able to more efficiently complete our motion pictures visual effects and animation projects -- ultimately resulting in more revenue." -- Benoit Girard, president and founder of four-time Emmy award- winning motion picture and broadcast visual effects studio Digital Dimension "We require highly scalable and reliable storage systems to store and analyze seismic data for our oil and gas customers. Isilon IQ clustered storage offers unsurpassed reliability, scalability and ease of use that enables us to perform our analysis more efficiently." -- Brad Stephens, Manager of IT Infrastructure for oil and gas seismic processing company Kelman Technologies "We first purchased an Isilon IQ cluster nearly a year ago, and have been very impressed with its performance in our mission critical productions. The new Isilon IQ 1920i with InfiniBand is a huge leap forward -- its performance and scalability required no network infrastructure changes and will ultimately help us to compete for and win more major feature film business." -- Mark Brown, vice president of technology for the Academy Award winning Rhythm and Hues visual arts production studio "We have long been a customer of Isilon and have been extremely impressed by their rate of innovation over the last year and a half. We have one of the world's largest Microsoft Windows high performance computing environments (more than 1,000 compute nodes) that require the highest levels of performance. Isilon has a winning combination with their constant innovation with their OneFS distributed file system and use of industry standard hardware. I don't believe any other vendor could have accomplished what they have in such a short period of time." -- Saker Klippsten, head of engineering for Emmy Award-winning ZOIC