Overview

Scale-out NAS vendor Isilon recently announced a number of additions to its product line, extending its portfolio with products that meet demanding performance-intensive application and long-term archival requirements.  New products include:

• Isilon IQ 5400S: The S-series introduces a new product line for Isilon: an IOPS performance-optimized platform. The initial offering, the IQ5400S, supports 16 - 518 TB in a single file system using 15K RPM SAS drives, supports transactional I/O and random access environments, and scales to 1.5 TB of globally coherent cache.
• Isilon IQ 36000X: An extension to the X-series product line, this is a highly-scalable throughput-optimized platform. The new IQ 36000X supports 252 TB - 3.5 PB in a single file system using high-density SATA drives and supports high bandwidth environments with high concurrent or sequential throughput. The IQ 36000X has three times the capacity per node and a 33% increase in density per rack over previous X-series models.
• Isilon IQ 36NL: Another new product line, the NL, is a bulk storage file archive platform that supports up to 36 TB (raw) in a 4u chassis and from 252 TB up to 3.45 PB in a single file system leveraging dense SATA disk drives.
• A new data reduction offering: Isilon also announced a new partnership with Ocarina to provide content-aware compression and deduplication across the entire Isilon product line. Isilon claims it will improve utilization by 20% and the combination of deduplication and compression will provide a 10:1 better reduction ratio than NAS solutions using conventional deduplication

Previously, users bought Isilon for throughput-intensive applications and had to go elsewhere for file storage to support I/O-intensive applications or archiving-those needs can now be met with the S- and NL-Series. The S-series fills a hole in the product line and will be a welcome addition for existing users who want to standardize on Isilon for NAS across-the-board.  It will also help Isilon expand to provide solutions for more traditional commercial NAS applications.  The NL is a natural expansion of the architecture to a new use case: bulk archive storage that scales into the multi-petabyte range.

What it Means

Scale-out NAS-which combines distributed NAS heads, storage, and advanced global file system software to create highly scalable computing clusters-is a key area of interest in data storage today. Data generated by new applications is pushing the capabilities of traditional storage solutions to their limits. A recent ESG survey of North American and Western European storage professionals at enterprise-level organizations (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) found a considerable opportunity for scale-out NAS solutions. In fact, 11% of respondents indicated their organizations are already using the technology to some degree and another 75% have imminent plans for or interest in deploying it (see Figure 1).[1] Scale-out NAS offers a compelling economic benefit.  With cost containment a top-of-mind-issue for almost every business, IT staffs must spend their allotted budgets more judiciously than ever. It follows, therefore, that organizations in the process of evaluating scale-out NAS would be more aware of and attracted to its total potential financial impact, which may result in both capital and operational savings. Specifically, the cost-related benefits that scale-out NAS technology offers include:

• Just-in-time scalability: With clustered scale-out systems, capacity and/or performance resources can be added as needed. Because of their modular nature, there is no requirement to buy (and subsequently power and cool) frames, power supplies, and mostly empty cabinets in advance of storage capacity.
• Riding the commodity curve: As users defer purchases of frames, processors, or disks, they can benefit from the ongoing decline in component prices over time.
• Higher utilization rates: Better utilization means deferred purchases of new capacity. Since all of the NAS heads in scale-out systems can address the entire pool of useable capacity in a given cluster, there is no stranded capacity.
• Operational savings: A single point of management allows scale-out NAS deployments to increase capacity without adding IT headcount. The attractiveness of this benefit is evident in the percentage of both current and planned users that cited ease of management as a key driver of scale-out NAS usage or plans seen in Figure 1.

With the S-series, Isilon is one of the only scale-out NAS vendors offering a scale-out solution for I/O-intensive NAS environments.

Isilon's To-Do List

The recent announcements fill the gaps in the Isilon product line and extend its solutions to meet the needs of commercial data centers looking for more cost-effective solutions.  The operational savings associated with scale-out are a key adoption driver.[2] But Isilon needs to take the solution one step further and continue to build out its sales and support organizations to extend its reach into enterprises with more traditional NAS deployments.  Specifically, Isilon needs to:

• Offer a consolidated, tiered solution with the global namespace that incorporates all three platforms. Many workflows have different performance requirements at different points in the production cycle-from initial file creation, when it is likely to be very active, all the way to the long tail file archive. While Isilon has SyncIQ for migrating data between platforms, each product is managed as a separate stovepipe with different performance characteristics. The next logical step is for Isilon to offer management of all three platforms as a single system image in the namespace and provide policy-based, non-disruptive movement across performance tiers. Managing one is always better than managing three.
• Continue to invest in sales and marketing to build brand awareness. While Isilon is already pretty well known in its focus markets such as media and entertainment, bioinformatics, satellite imaging applications, and Web 2.0, scale-out is just beginning to gain focus in commercial enterprises. Commercial enterprises are taking a hard look at rich media and Web 2.0 applications, so the requirement for scale-out platforms offering greater bandwidth is coming into the data center. Commercial enterprises are also overwhelmed with file data growth, and are beginning to recognize the efficiencies provided by scale-out solutions. Yet the major storage vendors don't have scale-out NAS solutions, haven't focused on bringing scale-out to the enterprise, or are just beginning to bring them to market. There is no clear leader in scale-out NAS in the commercial enterprise. There is an opportunity for Isilon to get some traction in commercial enterprises before some of the big name storage vendors can get their scale-out acts together.

The Bottom Line

As more and more traditional enterprises get dragged into Web 2.0 and find that their existing scale-up solutions don't scale bandwidth high enough to support Web 2.0 applications, they'll be looking for scale-out solutions to fill the gap.  And the avalanche of file data in the data center is pushing enterprises to look for viable solutions to reduce overall capital and operational expenses.  Scale-out solutions, because they can scale to massive capacity within a single system image and have a shared architecture that allows all processors to address all storage capacity, provide much better utilization rates than scale-up with a much better ratio of administrators to capacity.  The current economic downturn is forcing IT managers to look for more efficient solutions, and scale-out architectures provide just that.

Isilon has a short window of opportunity to wedge itself into commercial data centers and efficiently solve the file management challenges associated with massive file data growth.  Isilon is not yet on the radar of most commercial data centers-the scale-out requirement is just emerging there.  Isilon has the products, commercial data centers have the needs, and if Isilon can continue to ramp its sales and marketing capabilities to penetrate commercial data centers, it could make a dent in the market and build a name for itself before one of the biggies can slam the door.

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[1] Source: ESG 2008 Enterprise Storage Systems Survey, November 2008.

[2] For more information on scale-out NAS adoption drivers, see ESG Research Brief: Scale-Out NAS Adoption and Market Drivers, February 2009