Dell EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS Goes All-Flash

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, announced a new member of the Isilon product family, combining the performance of flash technology with scale-out NAS platform.

Isilon All-Flash is designed to help IT organizations modernize their infrastructure and deliver on the capabilities of a digital business.

Traditionally, All-Flash array (AFA) products have focused primarily on structured or block data sets and applications that support approximately 20% of all data in the data center. However, there is a growing imperative for IT to harness the value of unstructured data, which now accounts for 80% of all new data produced, managed and stored by enterprises today. To do this, organizations are using increasingly powerful next-generation applications and workloads that require high performance to process massive unstructured data sets and deliver the accelerated business outcomes enterprises demand. The company sees this unstructured data opportunity as the final flash frontier that requires a scale-out architecture designed to take advantage of flash media and provide the same enterprise-grade data protection, management, access and security that these unstructured data applications require today.

The firm is addressing this shift with the Isilon All-Flash scale-out family of NAS storage. Already a provider in all-flash storage with 30.9% market share, the company has combined the performance of flash technology with the scalability, multi-protocol access and security of Isilon OneFS OS. Formerly known as ‘Project Nitro,’ the dense, bladed-node architecture of Isilon All-Flash provides four Isilon nodes within a single 4U chassis with capacity options ranging from 92TB to 924TB per chassis. Available in several configurations, these units can be combined into a single cluster that provides up to 92.4PB of capacity and over 1.5TB/s of aggregate performance.

“As businesses move towards a digital future, there is an increasing need to support large-scale workloads that utilize unstructured data at unprecedented speeds. This can’t be done with hardware alone-software is the key to enabling customers to modernize their data centers, and the determining factor for the winners and losers in the all-flash market,” said Phil Bullinger, SVP, Isilon, Dell EMC. “Isilon All-Flash is specifically designed to address the need for extreme NAS performance, but also to provide the multi-protocol access, enterprise-grade data protection, security and ease of management capabilities that organizations expect from the industry’s #1 scale-out NAS solution.“

Isilon All-Flash storage is designed for a de range of next-generation applications and unstructured workloads that require NAS performance including, 4K streaming of data, genomic sequencing, electronic design automation and near real-time analytics with a choice of big data analytics vendors such as Hortonworks, Inc., Cloudera, Inc., Pivotal Software, Inc., IBM Corp. and Splunk, Inc.

Isilon All-Flash can be deployed as a new cluster, or can integrate with existing Isilon clusters to accelerate the performance of an enterprise data lake and lower the overall TCO of a multi-tiered all-flash and high capacity SATA solution. Powered by the OneFS OS, this offering is designed to provide the capabilities that enterprises require to modernize IT: performance, scalability, operational flexibility, increased efficiency, and enterprise-grade data protection and security.

Isilon all-flash customer benefits:

• Performance: with up to 25 million IO/s and 1.5TB/s throughput per cluster, Isilon All-Flash is designed to accelerate business outcomes for the demanding next-generation unstructured workloads

• Scale to fit: customers can start with a single 96TB 4U chassis and expand capacity by combining up to 100 Isilon All-Flash chassis and over 400 nodes into a single cluster to provide up to 92.4PB of storage capacity

• Next-generation multi-protocol access: with support for NFS, SMB, HDFS, Object, NDMP, FTP and more, Isilon’s multi-protocol access is unparalleled in the market place, delivering customers any unstructured data read and write access to all data, regardless of the protocol used

• Storage tiering: Isilon SmartPools and CloudPools allow customers to take advantage of automated storage tiering to reduce capital expenses and optimize storage resources by reserving their Isilon All-Flash storage for their demanding applications

• Efficiency: Isilon All-Flash solutions provide up to 80% storage utilization and can leverage Isilon SmartDedupe data de-duplication to reduce storage requirements by up to 30% or more

• Data security: to meet security and compliance regulations, Isilon All-Flash offers role-based access control (RBAC); secure access zones; WORM data protection; file system auditing; and data-at-rest encryption with self-encrypting drives.

Isilon All-Flash scale-out NAS storage is available for customers to pre-order starting, and will be available in 2017, along with new versions of OneFS that will be a free upgrade to all existing customers.

Jeremy Burton, CMO, Dell Technologies, said: “Dell EMC is the clear leader in all-flash storage because we have a market-leading portfolio that addresses the broadest set of workloads – we’re #1 in almost every segment we compete in. Isilon All-Flash builds on this momentum with the introduction of a brand new storage family to meet the demands of digital business. The numbers are mind-blowing – we’ve combined the speed of flash with the almost infinite scale and ease-of-use that has become the hallmark of Isilon.”

Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “Today’s data centers are already falling behind in both performance and scalability. In order to compete and remain relevant in a digital workforce, businesses need technology to support next generation applications and the most demanding workloads. Combining scale-out NAS with the extreme performance of flash technology solves this need-and customers can rely on all the things they love about Isilon in this new flash configuration. IT can now support the sky rocketing volume of unstructured data and provide faster business outcomes for users.”