Dell EMC Isilon is a
scale out
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.
In an economics, economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For ...
network-attached storage
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...
platform offered by
Dell EMC
Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud c ...
for high-volume storage, backup and archiving of
unstructured data
Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...
.
It provides a cluster-based storage array based on industry standard hardware, and is scalable to 50
petabyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s in a single filesystem using its
FreeBSD-derived
OneFS
The OneFS File System is a parallel distributed networked file system designed by Isilon Systems and is the basis for the ''Isilon Scale-out Storage Platform''. The OneFS file system is controlled and managed by the OneFS Operating System, a Fre ...
file system.
An Isilon clustered storage system is composed of three or more nodes. Each node is a
server
Server may refer to:
Computing
*Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients
Role
* Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...
integrated with proprietary operating system software called OneFS (based on
FreeBSD), which unifies a cluster of nodes into a single shared resource.
Isilon Systems
Isilon Systems was a computer hardware and software company founded in 2001 by Sujal Patel and Paul Mikesell, a 1996 graduate of the
. It was headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
It sold clustered file system hardware and software for digital content and other unstructured data to a variety of industries.
Isilon Systems became a publicly traded company on December 16, 2006. By this time, Isilon was selling its products indirectly through a channel partner program that included over 100 resellers and distributors, as well as directly through a field sales force. Its customers included
NBC Universal
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are ...
,
Cedars-Sinai,
Kelman Technologies, and
Kodak
The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...
, among others.
Poor initial performance of the new public company led to management changes in 2007 that brought back founder Sujal Patel as CEO.
In 2008, details emerged around an internal audit of Isilon System’s financials that led to a restatement of earnings.
Just before the company would have announced four profitable quarters in a row – the first profitable year in the company’s history – Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC Corporation in November 2010 for $2.25 billion.
Isilon after merger
EMC said that with its acquisition of Isilon, it would be better able to provide storage infrastructure for private and public cloud environments, with a focus on so-called
big data, like gene sequencing, online streaming, and oil and natural gas seismic studies.
At the time of acquisition, the list of Isilon’s clients had grown to include Sony, XM Radio, LexisNexis, Facebook, MySpace, Adobe, and several major movie studios and TV networks.
On November 10, 2015, EMC announced an expansion of its Isilon NAS portfolio with a scaled-down, software storage system for remote locations, a cloud migration application and high-availability upgrades for Isilon OneFS. The two software additions, IsilonSD Edge and CloudPools, will be available alongside the new version of OneFS in 2016. They are part of the vendor's data lakes strategy for storing and managing unstructured data in large repositories.
The new offerings will, according to one analyst, deliver a data lake-ready platform to enterprises with high-speed data analytics, and are aimed at three aspects of the Data Lake, the edge, the core, and the cloud.
On May 8, 2017, Dell EMC announced a new line of Isilon systems based on the "Infinity" architecture that "can hit up to 6x the IOPS, 11x the throughput, and ... twice the capacity over the previous generation Isilon."
The new Infinity architecture is modular, allowing system owners to increase each component as needed. Drive density has increased, with up to 60 drives in 4U of rack space, almost twice that of the previous generation. This also means the new nodes are physically smaller. Up to four nodes can sit
blade
A blade is the portion of a tool, weapon, or machine with an edge that is designed to puncture, chop, slice or scrape surfaces or materials. Blades are typically made from materials that are harder than those they are to be used on. Histor ...
-style in 4U of rack space. And Isilon now supports CPU and drive updates as they become available, without replacing the whole node.
In June 2020, with the release of OneFS 9.0, the product line also started using the "PowerScale" moniker.
Technology and architecture
Isilon clustered storage system architecture consists of independent nodes that are integrated with the
OneFS
The OneFS File System is a parallel distributed networked file system designed by Isilon Systems and is the basis for the ''Isilon Scale-out Storage Platform''. The OneFS file system is controlled and managed by the OneFS Operating System, a Fre ...
operating system software.
The systems can be installed in standard data center environments and are accessible to users and applications running Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac operating systems using industry standard file sharing protocols over standard Gigabit or 10-Gigabit Ethernet. Nodes within the clustered storage system communicate with each other over a dedicated 10Gb Ethernet local area network (
Infiniband
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...
in legacy installations). The architecture is designed so that each node has full visibility and write/read access to or from a single expandable file system.
Data protection is formed using
Reed–Solomon error correction coding. When a file is written it is spread across several nodes using parity calculated by which level you set the whole or parts of the cluster to.
Isilon provides multi-protocol access to files using
NFS,
SMB or
FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...
. In addition, Isilon supports
HDFS
Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...
as a protocol allowing Hadoop analytics
to be performed on files resident on the storage. Data can be stored using one protocol and accessed using another protocol. The key building blocks for Isilon include the OneFS operating system, the NAS architecture, the scale-out data lakes, and other enterprise features.
Recent deals between EMC and
Cloudera
Cloudera, Inc. is an American software company providing enterprise data management systems that make significant use of Apache Hadoop. As of January 31, 2021, the company had approximately 1,800 customers.
History
Cloudera, Inc. was formed on J ...
will allow the Cloudera Enterprise
Hadoop
Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...
kit to be sold directly from EMC and its channel partners. The deal may benefit the thousands of EMC Isilon customers with existing
data lake
A data lake is a system or repository of data stored in its natural/raw format, usually object blobs or files. A data lake is usually a single store of data including raw copies of source system data, sensor data, social data etc., and transform ...
s by providing a base for running analytic processes on their data, giving them access to Impala, Cloudera's open source, massively parallel processing SQL query engine that runs on Hadoop.
Awards and recognition
* EMC Isilon received the highest overall score among nine companies rated by Gartner in its January 2015 "Critical Capabilities for Scale-Out File System Storage" report. This report also called out Isilon’s scalable capacity, performance, easy-to-deploy clustered storage appliance approach and feature sets.
* EMC was described by Gartner in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays as a leader in the disk storage market because its management team invests heavily in its vision; is quick to correct mistakes; and is aggressive.
* EMC Isilon was included in ComputerWeekly’s 2014 survey of the "big six" storage array makers’ scale-out NAS product ranges.
References
External links
*
{{EMC
Computer storage companies
Storage Area Network companies
Computer companies established in 2010
2010 establishments in Washington (state)