EMC's new Isilon models are great little performers – but why no capacity increase?

EMC's Isilon has introduced two new go-faster products and a refresh release of its OneFS operating system, increasing performance and extending access protocol support – but not increasing capacity.

The new models from the scale-out filer business offer a twofold performance increase, and there are two of them.

In the high-transactional performance area, the S210 is an update on the S200. This could have 7.2TB, 14.4TB pr 21.6TB nodes in a cluster with maximum capacity of 3.11PB across 144 nodes.

The S210 can deliver up to 3.75 million IOPS/cluster and EMC says it is suited to high transactional workloads in the media and entertainment and financial services areas.

The X-series is balanced for performance and capacity, and the X410 updates the X400 which sits above the smaller X200 node. The X400 features up to 144TB/node and a 20PB+ cluster capacity limit.

EMC says the X410 offers a 70 per cent increase in throughput at 33 per cent less $/MBPS. It's good for Hadoop analytics, high performance computing and enterprise file applications.

The latest version of Isilon's OneFS operating system, v7.1.1, doubles the performance of this scale-out filer platform. EMC says it brings Hadoop to customers' Big Data (called a Data Lake) rather than the opposite – moving petabytes of data which takes time.

EMC claims its Isilon systems supports several protocols and access methods: NFS, SMB (CIFS), NDMP, HDFS, Objects via ViPR and OpenStack SWIFT native Object.

The systems also get SmartFlash flash-cache capabilities, which can grow to 1PB in a cluster and provide faster access to data.

It says customers should consider Isilon for existing workloads, such as home directories and file shares, and also analytics, cloud applications and mobile sync-and-share.

EMC and Pivotal have launched a Data Lake Hadoop Bundle that stores and analyses unstructured data. And VCE announced VCE Ready Certification for Isilon used for scale-out VDI and Hadoop analytics.

It's curious that EMC has not increased capacities on its Isilon kit. We expect VMware VVOL support to come by the middle of next year, together with direct data protection to Data Domain arrays by passing external backup products.

OneFS v7.1.1, the S210 and X410 products will be generally available this month. Support for enhanced HDFS and OpenStack SWIFT Object protocols are expected by the end of 2014. ®