Isilon A100 Performance Accelerator Node

On the EMC PULSE Products & Technology blog, Sam Grocott, VP marketing and product management at EMC Isilon, wrote:

Faster is, Indeed, Better !
 
EMC’s new Isilon A100 Performance Accelerator Node is all about speed… so let’s think about what speed really means. You’ve likely seen a recent TV commercial where a man asks a group of young kids whether it’s better to be faster or slower. One kid responds, quite precociously, Faster! and the way that he’d make his Grandma faster would be to tape a cheetah to her back.  I’m not sure how Grandma (or the cheetah) would feel about that, but when it comes to storage performance with the dynamic nature of today’s enterprise workflows and applications, being faster is, increasingly, a critically important point of differentiation. That’s why EMC has developed this new EMC Isilon product.
 
With enterprise need for speed in mind, EMC continues to push the frontiers of scale-out NAS with the introduction of our latest performance accelerator. The EMC Isilon A100 node is a next-generation performance accelerator designed for demanding environments that require maximum concurrent throughput and minimum latency. It will replace our existing Performance Accelerator node (Accelerator-X) and is expected to be available this July.
 
With 256GB of L1 cache per node (an eightfold increase over the 32GB of RAM available today), the Isilon A100 Performance Accelerator nodes can hold a huge, recently-accessed dataset in memory, enabling data to be read with extremely low latency. In addition, A100 nodes are expected to deliver aggregate throughput of 1,100MB/s per node, allowing enterprises to support high performance workflows that demand extreme levels of concurrent throughput.
 
In addition to providing customers the ability to scale performance independent of additional spindle capacity, A100 Performance Accelerator nodes also allow enterprises to accelerate cluster operations, including disk and node rebuilds, file striping and file-based replication.

Despite the fact that EMC was introducing the Isilon A100 at the National Association of Broadcasters annual event in Las Vegas, NE, April 8-11, delivering the type of storage performance that can support highly parallel workloads is a ‘must have’ for a range of industries beyond just media & entertainment. Whether it’s the genetic sequencing workflows of life science research organizations or the upstream energy exploration efforts of the oil & gas industry, extreme performance has become table stakes for storage vendors looking to seriously compete for the right to support next gen workflows and applications.
 
With Isilon solving customer needs by continuing to extend the limits of scale-out NAS performance, don’t be surprised to see our competitors get a little desperate and try to keep pace by resorting to product development efforts that involve a couple rolls of tape and one very angry cheetah…