Isilon NAS Supporting 4TB HDDs

EMC Corporation announced support for 4TB drives for Isilon‘s scale-out NAS solutions.

With this enhancement to its X-Series and NL-Series products, Isilon
further extends the inherent benefits of its scale-out NAS archiving
solutions – ease-of-use, scalable capacity and performance,
auto-management and self-healing – by delivering capacity of up to 20PB
in a single volume, providing 33% more capacity and utilizing 30% less
power per rack.

Enterprises across a spectrum of vertical markets are seeking more
efficient and cost-effective ways of building and managing large,
rapidly-growing information repositories. Rapid growth of file-based
data has increased the need for highly-scalable and efficient archive
storage solutions that meet business, legal and regulatory compliance
requirements in markets such as government, healthcare and media &
entertainment. With these drivers top of mind across industries, the
need for efficient and cost-effective disk-based archive solutions has
been important.

With Isilon, archival information benefits from the robustness of the
OneFS operating environment’s capabilities for protecting and optimizing
the flow of information within an organization. Enterprises capture
these benefits without sacrificing application performance or the
specialized data protection required for long-term archive data
retention via archive applications from EMC or other vendors.

Isilon also offers increased resilience at scale with faster drive
rebuild times, data protection and efficiency. The power of the Isilon
scale-out cluster rebuilds active and archive data in case of a drive
failure faster than traditional systems – less than one day, compared to
multiple days or even weeks with most traditional systems. Isilon’s N+4
data protection through FlexProtect file striping helps customers
reduce the risk of data loss and improve overall availability even as
the cluster grows. As data archives get larger, the significance of
these factors increases proportionally while EMC Isilon scales from
terabytes to petabytes.

New support for 4TB drives enables more capacity in the same footprint
while providing the Isilon utilization rates of more than 80%. For
example, per rack capacity is now 1,440TB with NL400 nodes, a 360TB
increase in the same footprint.  With 4TB configurations, customers need
fewer nodes to meet the same total capacity goals. Now, only seven
NL400 nodes with 4TB drives are needed as opposed to ten NL400 nodes
with 3TBe drives to achieve the same raw 1PB of capacity.

EMC Isilon X Series and NL Series products with 4TB drives are available.

Laura DuBois, program VP, IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions, said: "Based
on recent research data and surveys of our clients, it’s very clear
that end users are motivated to identify and implement storage
infrastructures that can cost-effectively support rapidly-growing
archive tiers of file-based data. EMC Isilon’s recent selection as a
leader in IDC’s MarketScape: Worldwide Scale-Out File-Based Storage 2012 Vendor Analysis supports its consideration as an appropriate solution for large-scale archiving needs."

R. Todd Thomas, CIO, Austin Radiological Association, said: "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. EMC Isilon’s incredible ease-of-use and
massive scalability – even more impressive now with the addition of 4TB –
has proven to be the ideal solution for our most pressing file-based
storage challenges."

Trevor Daughney, director, product marketing, Symantec Corporation, said: "Our
customers who use EMC Isilon scale-out NAS storage with Symantec
Enterprise Vault software experience an advanced level of scalability,
reliability, availability, and automation in storing archival data.
Additionally, our joint customers lower their costs by moving data to
the more economical archive storage layer, freeing up space for
immediate critical access to data within their primary storage. The
Symantec-EMC Isilon integration maximizes the value of our customers’
strategic data assets and propels business forward."

Dirk De keersmaecker, product manager PACS infrastructure, McKesson Enterprise Medical Imaging, said: "Isilon
provides our customers the scalable capacity that allows us to manage
their short-term and long-term archive data with ease. EMC Isilon’s
architecture is well suited to support the McKesson Horizon Medical
Imaging and Enterprise Image Repository applications, providing high
data availability and system reliability associated with the Isilon
FlexProtect data protection scheme. The scalability, availability,
performance and reliability inherent in the EMC Isilon storage platform
are key components in McKesson’s ability to provide a complete PACS
solution to satisfy the stringent requirements of any healthcare
delivery team."

Rudi Ernst, CEO aand CTO, PIXIA Corp., said: "With
a focus on high-performance scalable data access solutions for Defense
and Military branches around the world, PIXIA helps customers realize
the full potential of accessing massive archives of Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) datasets on EMC Isilon’s scale-out
storage. EMC Isilon’s ease of use and scalable capacity up to 20PB of
content in a single volume allows PIXIA to meet the demands of the rapid
data growth our customers are seeing. By combining PIXIA’s HiPER STARE
and HiPER WATCH products with EMC Isilon we are able to provide our
customers proven, end-to-end solutions ideally suited to meeting the
challenges of securely storing, analyzing, and managing massive amounts
of imagery and video data."

Pieter Hornix, CTO, FilmPartners/Partnerfilm Group, said: "As
a leader in collaborative video editing solutions, MXFserver from
FilmPartners relies on the scalable capacity that Isilon provides with
up to 20PB of content in a single volume. The MXFserver integration with
Isilon provides a highly responsive environment that scales to meet the
most demanding post-production workflows with minimal administration
and zero down-time.  With Isilon’s built-in auto-tiering, we can offer
our customers a flexible, responsive, and scalable tiered storage
environment that enables the next-gen workflows so important to modern
broadcast facilities."

Juan Guevara, storage practice director, Trace3, said: "EMC
Isilon scalable performance and capacity allows Trace3 customers to
manage both their active and archive data in a single volume with ease,
all the way up to 20PB. The core benefits of the Isilon architecture –
simplicity, scalability, efficiency, performance and resiliency – and
the fact that it’s tailored to large-scale data mean that we can offer
our customers the type of availability and system reliability needed to
manage the fast-growing, unstructured data that powers enterprises
today."

Sam Grocott, VP marketing and product management, EMC Isilon, said: "The
value of Scale-Out NAS is growing increasingly higher as large-scale
data is rapidly created – presenting a business opportunity and an
archiving headache for today’s enterprises. As data grows at an
unprecedented rate, the ability to archive an organization’s most
important data is incredibly important. While archives used to be static
and slow-growing, today they must be dynamic and quick to scale, making
the benefits of scale-out storage even more pronounced. Supporting 4TB
drives in EMC Isilon systems enables enterprises to archive quickly and
easily while still achieving much-needed data resiliency and efficiency."

Shane Jackson, VP marketing, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division, said: "Isilon
scale-out NAS storage is an ideal complement to the EMC SourceOne
archiving solution.  The breadth of applications and workloads supported
by SourceOne requires flexibility in archive storage options and EMC
Isilon delivers the performance, reliability, and scalability for
customers looking to use scale-out NAS for their archive storage.  In
addition, the power and simplicity of an end-to-end EMC archiving
solution delivers rapid time-to-value and an unbeatable ROI for our
joint customers."