Question: Archive? Answer: Isilon Scale-out NAS with New 4 TB Drives

There are few enterprise storage use cases that stress the seams of traditional storage systems quite like large and rapidly-growing file-based data archives. In nearly every customer conversation that I’ve had over the last few quarters, dealing with the current and rapidly growing “archive” environment is top-of-mind for our prospects and customers. Underlying architectural weaknesses are magnified, bottlenecks become chokepoints and what’s manageable at small scale becomes impossible to manage at larger scale. And just to make the situation even more challenging, as data volumes grow, the business, legal and regulatory compliance requirements surrounding that data are growing in lock step, if not faster. I’ve heard loud and clear that what enterprises need is a solution purpose-built to easily and simply handle the demands of these increasingly important archive environments – one that fits seamlessly in their environment today and scales for tomorrow.

With that in mind, we recently announced support for 4 terabyte drives for EMC® Isilon’s® industry-leading scale-out NAS solutions. With the introduction of this enhancement to our X-Series and NL-Series products, we further extend the inherent benefits of our scale-out NAS archiving solutions – ease-of-use, highly scalable capacity and performance, auto-management and self-healing – by delivering capacity of up to 20 petabytes in a single volume, providing 33% more capacity and utilizing 30% less power per rack.

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Simply put, the industry-leading benefits of Isilon scale-out NAS become even more valuable the larger the environment – whether you are at hundreds of terabytes or many petabytes. With the amount of data to be archived expected to double in the next three years, the need for highly-scalable and cost-effective disc-based archive solutions has never been more important. And with the introduction of 4 terabyte availability and the corresponding 144 terabyte node, we at Isilon continue to deliver.

Customers have discovered that we are an ideal archive storage solution for use cases from medical imaging to defense and military installations; from video surveillance to upstream oil and gas production. Wherever large amounts of file-based data are being produced, the remarkable scalability and simplicity of the Isilon platform stands out.

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In the words of a key customer:

“At ARA, we’ve relied on Isilon as the repository for our digital mammography program for many years. So, when the time came to choose a product to serve as an archive for all of our related medical and other imagery, the choice was easy. Isilon’s incredible ease-of-use and massive scalability — even more impressive now with the addition of 4 terabyte drives — has proven to be the ideal solution for our most pressing file-based storage challenges.”-R Todd Thomas, Chief Information Officer, Austin Radiological Association

And it’s not just customers taking notice. IDC recently selected Isilon as a leader in its Worldwide Scale-Out File-Based Storage 2012 Vendor Analysis. And we are the only vendor to receive the highest rating of “outstanding” in Gartner’s new “Critical Capabilities for Scale-Out File System Storage” report.

So, if the question being asked is “how to archive?” the clear answer is Isilon scale-out NAS.

About the Author: Nick Kirsch