Isilon Adds HPC Customers

EMC
Corporation announced that
Isilon continues to be the preferred scale-out NAS solution
of choice for organizations with high performance computing needs.

Organizations across a range of industries are turning to Isilon to help them
manage and access their most mission-critical data for timely and accurate analysis,
leading to new discoveries, faster product development and better business
decision-making.

When Digital Globe needed to accelerate the performance of its Big
Data-intensive geospatial information services, the company turned to EMC
Isilon and significantly improved its data processing capacity and performance,
while reducing production times and total cost of storage ownership. As a
result, Digital Globe can deliver its fully processed high-resolution images to
customers faster and at less cost.

At Columbia
University’s Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Isilon
provides the storage foundation for a variety of compute-intensive
bioinformatics research initiatives. John Lowell Wofford, director of IT
services for C2B2, said, "In this
era of Big Data, it’s clear that technology plays a critical role in the
management and analysis of data for our researchers. I used to worry that our
IT system couldn’t keep pace with those growing computational demands. But with
EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, we no longer have to worry about the scalability of
our storage environment. This system is so streamlined and flexible.
Improvements of capacity and performance go hand-in-hand with no compromise of
one over the other. This technology backbone may help bring a new drug to
market faster or enable our researchers to discover a genomic breakthrough."

Also in
higher education, the University of Buffalo Center for Computational Research
supports hundreds of researchers and academics who have dedicated themselves to
innovating in data-intensive industries such as bioinformatics and geohazards.
Tony Kew, storage administrator of the Center for Computational Research
commented, "We operate 24x7x365, so
downtime and performance bottlenecks are simply unacceptable. We support
hundreds of researchers with limited IT staff, so we need storage that’s simple
to manage and easy to scale. Isilon delivers on all fronts, while also
providing highly concurrent performance to accelerate our research."

By deploying
EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, PetroChina, the publicly-traded arm of China National
Petroleum Corporation, has consolidated a variety of mission-critical
applications on a single file system and point of management, streamlining Big
Data management to accelerate time-to-discovery in oil and gas exploration.
Using EMC Isilon, PetroChina can provide its scientists with immediate, highly
concurrent access to seismic data and applications, improving collaboration and
operating efficiency.

As a
provider of comprehensive, end-to-end geospatial solutions, The Sanborn Map Company, Inc. processes
thousands of images each day. After achieving a more than 500 percent increase
in performance over the previous storage system using Isilon, Doyle Heisler
, director of IT, said: "At Sanborn,
customer demand for our geospatial solutions can simply be described as ‘more,
better, faster,’ with each new project raising the bar in terms of size,
complexity and turnaround time. By deploying Isilon IQ, we’ve increased image
processing speeds 5X, enabling us to complete projects in much less time and
pursue new business opportunities that would have been impossible without
Isilon."

Christopher
Angel , IT systems analyst, Canadian Light Source, Inc., noted: "With demand continuing to increase for our
synchrotron-based research, we needed to move away from the complexity and
limitations of our traditional SAN to a simpler, more flexible and
cost-effective storage solution. Isilon fit the bill, as it not only simplified
management and improved application performance, but its scale-out architecture
also ensures we’ll never need a forklift upgrade again."

In June, the
Isilon S200 scale-out NAS system broke performance records for a single file
system as established by the Standard Performance Evaluation
Corporation (SPEC). The Isilon S200 meets growing demands of Big Data with the
ability to drive a number of transactional I/Os with multiple workflows
and to conduct multiple protocols in a single file system and single volume.
For companies with HPC requirements, this means no more compromise between
performance and capacity, and enables them to extract value from their
business information quickly, collaboratively, and securely.

EMC Isilon was at Supercomputing ’11 Conference.