STORAGE

Isilon Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced at Storage Networking World, in Orlando Florida, that it has expanded its award-winning product line of Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 clustered storage systems with the addition of the Isilon IQ 6000. With this release, Isilon brings to market the storage industry's largest production-ready single file system, providing a superior, 250 Terabyte capacity, clustered storage solution for both tier-one and tier-two storage needs. The Isilon IQ 6000 is the first clustered storage solution to implement Hitachi's state-of-the-art 500 Gigabyte SATA-2 drives as a key component of its system (see separate release). Isilon IQ 6000 provides customers with key benefits that include reduction of storage ownership costs while reaching the highest capacity and availability of any clustered storage system. Isilon Systems also announced today that IFILM, Kodak EasyShare Gallery and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) are among the first to deploy the Isilon IQ 6000 for their mission critical tier-one and tier-two storage needs. "The explosive growth of unstructured data -- images, documents, video, audio and research data, computer models and simulations -- represents the fasting growing class of data in enterprises, governments and universities. Traditional storage systems were not designed to effectively manage and store this type of information," said Sujal Patel, founder and CTO, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ 6000 represents an important expansion of Isilon's clustered storage product line, which is specifically designed to provide unmatched capacity, scalability and ease of use needed for customers to recognize the full value of their critical information." The Isilon IQ 6000 ushers in the highest capacity single file system available on the market today. Powered by its award-winning OneFS(TM) distributed file system software, the Isilon IQ 6000 scales to more than 250 Terabytes and more than three Gigabytes per second of throughput in a single file system, enabling customers with large and rapidly growing data storage requirements to easily manage and access one large single pool of storage, resulting in dramatically improved collaboration and workflow efficiency, as well as significantly reduced IT costs. The Isilon IQ 6000 can scale to 126 Terabytes in a single 42U rack, reducing the precious data center space and costs required for high capacity storage. In addition to offering high capacity, the Isilon IQ 6000, with its OneFS distributed file system, provides unmatched availability in a clustered storage solution. OneFS features the unique FlexProtect-AP feature utilizing Reed Solomon "N+2" ECC, that spans multiple nodes within a cluster -- enabling customers to withstand the loss of multiple disks or nodes without losing access to any data. Isilon IQ 6000 is a first of its kind storage solution for both tier-one and tier-two storage, providing customers with the linear scaling of performance and capacity required for many tier-one primary storage applications, as well as the capacity and availability required for tier-two storage applications which include near-line archiving, disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery. Rapid Deployment of Isilon IQ 6000 The Incorporated Research Institution for Seismology (IRIS) has made an initial, 60 terabyte purchase of the Isilon IQ 6000 to accelerate the collection and delivery of its exploding seismology data stores. IRIS, supported by the National Science Foundation, other federal agencies, universities, and private foundations, is dedicated to exploring the Earth's interior through the collection and distribution of seismographic data. In deploying the Isilon IQ 6000, IRIS created one single pool of seismology data, enabling them to move to an all digital workflow, leaving behind the scalability restraints and resources requirements associated with their former tape-based storage system. "The IRIS Data Management Center receives several tens of terabytes of new seismic data annually on a continuous and uninterrupted basis from more than 1000 seismic stations around the globe," said Tim Ahern, IRIS Data Management System. "We needed a storage solution that would minimize the administrative burden and allow us to expand the system capacity with a minimum amount of interruption. The intelligence built into the Isilon IQ 6000 product allows us to do exactly that and we will be able to reduce our operating costs and greatly simplify our storage management. Most of our future storage growth will be directed toward the Isilon storage solution." Kodak EasyShare Gallery, the leading online digital photo developing service, has added 192 Terabytes of Isilon IQ 6000 to its existing Isilon clustered storage infrastructure as their primary tier-one storage that supports their 24x7x365 online business. The Isilon IQ 6000 provides Kodak EasyShare Gallery with unmatched single file system scalability, availability and ease of use and management. Isilon IQ 6000 also enables Kodak EasyShare Gallery to simplify its storage architecture and respond to both rapidly increasing image resolutions and its rapidly expanding customer base of more than 23 million users, while also eliminating costly third-party servers that were previously required between the application servers and legacy storage. IFILM, one of the leading video-entertainment destinations on the Web, has purchased the Isilon IQ 6000 for the encoding, storage, and online delivery of their Internet-based video and audio programming. IFILM, with one of the largest collections of viral and user-generated video along with channels of the best short films, TV clips, and music videos and action sports, delivers more than 30 million streams per month, making it one of the top ten streaming media sites in the world. MTV Networks, a unit of Viacom Inc., recently acquired IFILM Corp. to join MTV Network's leading multi-platform brands. The Isilon IQ 6000 joins Isilon's award-winning family of next-generation clustered storage systems, including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 -- which are powered by the latest version of Isilon's award-winning OneFS distributed file system software and use high speed, low-latency InfiniBand for intracluster communication.