Isilon crams 1.6 Petabytes into clustered NAS system

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Storage vendor Isilon Systems has launched a new Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance which it claimed is the industry's first such system to offer 1.6 Petabytes of clustered storage in a single file system and single volume.

Its IQ 9000 and EX 9000 use the company's OneFS 4.7 operating system, which it said would use disks more efficiently and feature thin provisioning and smart quota management.

Each platform node contains 12 Seagate 750GB SATA-II disk drives and cram in 9TB of capacity into one 2U high box. These can be clustered to offer 1.6 Petabytes of storage in a single file system. The company said that companies could expand storage needs on a "pay-as-you-grow" basis.

The boxes also come with storage management software such as SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ, and SyncIQ.

Brett Goodwin, vice president of Marketing and Business Development at Isilon Systems said that the products offered customers a pool of storage that is 100 times more scalable than traditional storage systems.

"Clustered storage, following the rise and broad adoption of the clustered computing paradigm, is rapidly ascending as a vital IT architecture driving innovation and business breakthroughs across the enterprise," he said.

Analysts said that dynamic data is fast becoming persistent and organisations are retaining this type of data more and more within their operations.

"We are finding that companies and organisations want to retain persistent data for the foreseeable future using it for a wide range of things including their core business, others are using it as part of an extended active archive," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Some are using it for corporate governance and compliance and it is also being used as a large storage repository to relieve their tier one platforms that are better suited for dynamic data."

Asaro said that the appliance would suit web 2.0 applications because of its "scalability, extensibility, ease of use and cost-effectiveness".

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