Isilion looks to enterprise needs with new scale-out NAS

Isilion has increased the maximum capacity of its network-attached storage (NAS) system to 5.2PB (petabytes),nn an effort to help enterprises deal with the ever-increasing amount of data, The company has also launched a new appliance to speed up backups.

Isilon is known for its "scale-out" clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems. Each of its IQ nodes runs the OneFS operating system. This week it announced a new version of its operating system, OneFS 5.5. According to the company, this gives it more than 5PB of capacity (from 3.5PB previously), and offers enterprises a much more scalable product as the Isilon cluster capacity can be increased to 144 nodes (from 96 nodes previously). It also offers 45Gbit/s of aggregate performance, and 1.7 million IOPS of performance in a single file system.

OneFS 5.5 also includes a new version of the FlexProtect data protection application, which Isilion says can deliver 50 percent less overhead. Storage monitoring and reporting functionality has been beefed up as well. Native Windows Active Directory and byte-range locking has also been added.

"With our clustered backup, you just add another clustered node, so it is totally scalable and easy to use," said Isilon CTO Paul Rutherford. "In an Isilon system, you buy just what you need, when you need it."

"We guarantee our customers upward compatibility, and there is always an upgrade path that does not require you swap out your hardware," Rutherford told Techworld. "You can just add a node to get more capacity, and the system never goes down when changing nodes."

Meanwhile, Isilon has also upgraded its replication software, SyncIQ 2.5, which it says provides increased speed, intelligence and efficiency.

And not content with that, Isilon has also launched a new Back-up Accelerator product. This appliance, again uses OneFS v5.5, and runs on hardware with dual quad-core Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, and 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel connectivity. Isilon says this delivers up to 480MB/s bandwidth across four concurrent streams.

As expected, this Back-up Accelerator product can be added to any Isilon cluster, and reduces the time to backup data. For companies that need more backup bandwidth and capacity, additional Back-up Accelerators can be added.

"The Back-up Accelerator slides into the backup rack, and connects to a tape library, via the SAN, via fibre channel," said Rutherford. "It is a scalable backup solution, and you can backup to tape very quickly."

Isilon also announced an integrated enterprise back-up solution that combines the Back-up Accelerator and Atempo's Time Navigator software.

The Back-up Accelerator and the IQ product platform have also been certified to work with CommVault's Simpana 8 deduplicating data protection software.

Isilon's OneFS 5.5 and its replication software (SyncIQ 2.5) are immediately available, and is free-of-charge to users with an active support contract. For new users, price per TB is usually between $2,000 (£1,211) to $4,000 (£2,422) on the primary disk, and $1,500 (£908) on the secondary disks.

Isilon's Back-up Accelerator is also available immediately with a list price of $38,550 (£23,345) per node.