ACADEMIA

Isilon Delivers 2X the Performance at Half the Cost; Isilon and Pivotal Unite To Deliver Hadoop Analytics for Data Lakes

EMC has announced a major upgrade to EMC Isilon OneFS, new Isilon platforms and new solutions that reinforce the industry's first enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake. The new products and capabilities, which include ongoing support for HDFS, will help customers significantly advance their ability to ingest, store, protect and manage massive amounts of unstructured data. By leveraging HDFS for the Data Lake, EMC enables customers to bring Hadoop to their Big Data rather than vice versa--avoiding the time and costs involved with moving petabytes of data.

"EMC has shown its commitment to pushing design forward with the new X410 and X210 platforms by increasing performance and capacity for Isilon, giving companies like ours the room to grow intelligently. We tend to push these products well beyond what most industries could test against, not only from a performance standpoint, but in actual production usage. Like some of our peers in media and entertainment, we're already delivering shows in 4K, which has a profound impact on our infrastructure. With data growing what seems exponentially, there are very few platform choices we can trust our data with that can give us the performance confidence of delivering our projects on time. Isilon is agile enough to optimize for many different types of access patterns, which is why it's our product of choice," said Saker Klippsten, CTO, Zoic Studios.

Data Lakes are gaining popularity as the go-to, highly scalable repository for storing data from a wide variety of sources, generated by traditional and next-generation workloads, and consumed through a range of mechanisms without needing to be managed by separate, multiple silos of storage. Data Lakes are an order of magnitude more scalable than existing approaches for consolidation into a single file system, single volume Data Lake and, with today's Hadoop capabilities, the Isilon Data Lake is analytic-ready.

New EMC Isilon software, hardware and solution offerings enable customers to build an enterprise-grade, scale-out Data Lake that leverages EMC Isilon storage and enterprise-grade services including data protection, data management, performance management and security. Core to its Data Lake offering, EMC has redefined scale-out NAS through two new EMC Isilon platforms - the Isilon S210 and Isilon X410 - and OneFS software, delivering 2X the performance and heightened agility over previous generations.

Long known for its near-limitless scale, EMC Isilon easily handles petabytes of Big Data in industries that create massive amounts of sensitive data that directly correlate to their bottom lines, including Media & Entertainment, Financial Services and Life Sciences. The new EMC Isilon offerings work together to further enhance scale per cluster, performance, agility and cost-effectiveness in these most-demanding environments.

Other solutions create "islands" of storage that are difficult and costly to manage, resulting in hot spots, inefficiencies and poor storage utilization. They also require heavy lifting to scale. The Isilon-enabled Data Lake supports multiple protocols and access methods such as NFS, SMB, NDMP, HDFS, OBJECT via ViPR and OpenStack SWIFT native Object, supporting both traditional workloads such as home directories and file shares as well as next-generation workloads such as analytics, cloud applications and mobile sync-and-share.

New Software and Platforms

EMC Isilon's operating system, OneFS, is a core building block for Isilon Scale-Out NAS. The new version (OneFS 7.1.1) includes new SmartFlash, a flash-based cache enabling customers to get to their data more quickly which can scale up to one petabyte in a single cluster. The result is optimized performance with simplified management, 100% flash efficiency and reduced latency for traditional and next-generation workloads.

EMC also unveiled the Isilon S210 and X410. The Isilon S210 runs up to 3.75 million IOPS per cluster and provides flexible configuration and deployment, making it ideal for high transactional workloads ideal for industries such as media and entertainment and financial services. The Isilon X410 offers 70%  increase in throughput at 33% less $/MBPS, and its versatility easily supports Hadoop analytics, high performance computing and enterprise file applications.

New Hadoop Big Data Analytics Solutions

Also announced today, EMC and Pivotal revealed a new Big Data Analytics Solution, reinforcing EMC's position as an industry leader in Hadoop storage infrastructure. EMC is the first scale-out NAS provider to natively integrate HDFS for Big Data analytics, and the #1 market leader in enterprise shared storage for HDFS. The solution is offered as a Data Lake Hadoop Bundle, providing the ability to gain powerful analytics capabilities quickly and easily with the cost advantages of a highly efficient scale-out platform.

In related news, VCE today announced that it will offer Vblock Systems with EMC Isilon for scale-out VDI and Hadoop analytics through new technology extensions.

"The Isilon scale-out Data Lake is EMC's strategy to solve the world's biggest storage challenge, the growth of unstructured data created by traditional and next-gen applications. This rollout of the new EMC Isilon software, platforms and solutions are designed to help our customers address these challenges while driving faster time to results and reducing costs," commented Sam Grocott, Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing, EMC Isilon.

Availability

EMC Isilon OneFS 7.1.1 and the S210 and X410 storage platforms and all solutions will be generally available in July 2014. Support for enhanced HDFS and OpenStack SWIFT Object protocols are expected to be available by the end of 2014.