Special Section: SNW, Fall 2004 - More News From SNW:

Isilon Extends Leadership In Clustered Storage Reliability

Isilon Systems announced the third generation of its award-winning OneFS distributed file system at Storage Networking World 2004. OneFS 3.0 combines mission-critical reliability and high availability with state-of-the-art data protection to help storage administrators worry less, do more and sleep better at night. OneFS 3.0 includes new advanced data protection technologies, FlexProtect-AP, which can rebuild a failed 250GB disk in as little as one hour -- faster than more costly Fibre Channel disks and up to 24 times faster than other enterprise storage systems using Serial ATA (SATA).

"Isilon IQ already is extremely reliable, and now Isilon has taken it to another level by supporting industry leading drive rebuild times with FlexProtect-AP," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Isilon understands that its customers are using Isilon IQ to store digital content and reference data, which have extremely high storage growth rates and therefore requires more disk drives. And with any storage system, as you add more drives, you statistically increase the chance of drive failures. FlexProtect-AP's fast rebuild times equates to greater data protection and higher availability. Isilon smartly keeps adding innovative functionality that is well-suited for its market and the needs of its customers."

OneFS 3.0 Delivers Industry Leading Availability and Reliability

OneFS 3.0, which powers the family of award-winning Isilon IQ clustered storage systems, includes several new features and benefits. FlexProtect-AP introduces state-of-the-art functionality which rebuilds failed disks in a fraction of the time, harnesses free storage space across the entire cluster to further insure against data loss, and proactively monitors and preemptively migrates data off of at-risk components. Conventional enterprise storage systems limit parity reconstruction operations to a subset of the storage system -- a technique that leads to recovery bottlenecks, increases the time it takes to reprotect data, and significantly increases the risk of data loss during a single component failure. Traditional RAID-5 parity protection results in data loss if multiple component failures occur before a full component rebuild can complete. In contrast, FlexProtect-AP automatically distributes all data and error correction information across all Isilon IQ nodes in a cluster and, by using multiple error correction techniques, OneFS 3.0 efficiently and reliably ensures that all data remains intact and fully accessible even in the unlikely event of multiple component failures.

"At Sony Pictures Imageworks, we need all files to be available 24x7 from a single pool of storage," said Dean Miya, director of systems research and development. "We're testing a 20-node 45 TB Isilon IQ cluster with OneFS 3.0, and have been very impressed with the simplicity and performance of the system."

OneFS 3.0 is also tightly integrated with Isilon's SyncIQ replication software, enabling customers to make fast disk-based copies of their mission critical files to other Isilon IQ clusters. This eliminates the time and effort required to perform a traditional backup and restore operation, reduces risk and reduces downtime. For enhanced disaster recovery, OneFS 3.0 also adds support for the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), enabling serverless backup and restore operations with leading tape-based storage systems.

"Earlier versions of OneFS demonstrated our strong lead in manageability and scalability, but OneFS 3.0 also demonstrates our commitment to leading the industry in the highest availability of and reliability for our customers' data," said Sujal Patel, co-founder and CTO of Isilon Systems. "Customers can rest easily knowing OneFS 3.0 is constantly monitoring the total health of their system, and that it is making data protection more efficient and affordable than ever before."