Four New Customers for Isilon

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced rising adoption of its scale-out NAS solutions in the server virtualization market. Leading organizations including the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH), Surgient, Stronghold Data and Webair are all using Isilon IQ to maximize the benefits of server virtualization, eliminating the barrier of traditional storage to drive increased simplicity, agility, efficiency and value for their operations.

Stronghold Data, provider of enterprise data services, is using Isilon IQ to power real-time data replication of entire compute environments including virtualized servers and desktop computing. To provide its clients with continuous data replication for disaster recovery, Stronghold has deployed an integrated solution combining VMware, Isilon IQ and Isilon’s SyncIQ asynchronous data replication software, delivering immediate, 24x7x365 data access with industry-leading levels of data protection.

"Since moving to Isilon, we’ve seen a significant improvement in the performance of our virtualized environment," said David Markely, CIO, Stronghold Data. "NFS performance for VMware has been stellar and with Isilon, it’s easier to manage data in the virtual environment."

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH) is one the busiest public library systems in the country, with visitors to its central location checking out more items every year than the central libraries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Seattle. Using Isilon IQ, PLCH has unified its entire virtualized environment – including intranet and internet applications, SQL databases, more than one thousand Exchange users, and reservation systems for the library – onto a single, easily scalable file system, improving the efficiency of its virtual data center, while reducing capital and operational expenses.

"With Isilon, the capabilities and low cost allowed us to get the storage solution we needed," said Jason Buydos, director of technical services, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. "Not only does Isilon enable us to get more from our virtualized machines, it requires less than 20 minutes of management time per day."

Webair, a web hosting provider with tens of thousands of customers worldwide, is using Isilon scale-out NAS as the primary storage repository for its virtual data center – including MySQL databases and Apache servers – eliminating the data fragmentation and complex storage management challenges associated with traditional SAN and NAS. With Isilon IQ, Webair spends less than two hours per month managing its storage system.

"Server virtualization provides the simplicity and agility we need to deliver world-class webhosting services to thousands of customers," said Brian Hourigan, senior technical manager, Webair. "However, traditional storage is simply too complex and inefficient to support a highly virtualized environment. By deploying Isilon IQ, our VMware solution now has the ideal storage architecture to maximize its core benefits, enabling us to eliminate storage complexity as a barrier to success and drive increased operating leverage and efficiency for our business."

As a result of deploying server virtualization, enterprise businesses often create hundreds or even thousands more machine instances than without virtualization. This magnifies the already-challenging complexity and scalability limitations of traditional SAN and NAS, which, in turn, increases operational overhead and compromises storage utilization efficiency and overall business agility. By using Isilon scale-out NAS in combination with server virtualization, enterprises can directly address the challenges of traditional storage architectures in virtualized environments to improve the management, performance, utilization and total cost of storage.

"As enterprise IT continues to adopt server virtualization at an astounding rate, the expectations for virtualization to dramatically simplify the overhead – and reduce the costs – of large-scale server environments are rising," said Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing, Isilon Systems. "Yet without the use of scale-out NAS to address storage infrastructure complexity, cost and performance challenges, these expectations will remain unfulfilled. By deploying Isilon IQ, customers can achieve simplicity at scale and unlock the full potential of server virtualization."