Daily Briefing - Isilon Introduces High IOPS NAS
The minimum configuration is 3 nodes, meaning an entry level system has 16.2TB's of storage; 12 connections to the IP network and 24 cores in the cluster. The result is high performance for demanding workloads. As you would expect in a cluster as you add nodes the memory forms a globally coherent cache combined with the faster spinning lower latency SAS drives, a full cluster can generate over a million IOPS.
So who needs an S-Series? The S-Series is designed for demanding applications where performance and processing time can affect time to market. This is often characterized by batch job types of applications where while a simulation or build is being generated, not much can happen. It’s essentially downtime until the batch job is complete.
Another ideal area could be storage for virtualized environments where the support of NFS mounted storage is supported; Citrix XEN and VMware are good examples. The three node 15TB starting point is ideal for a virtualization project as it begins to rollout. More importantly, as the virtualization project moves to production the ability to simply scale a single file system to support the entire environment seems very attractive and efficient. See our article on VMware Storage Options for more details.
The S-Series inherits the OneFS file system of the other Isilon product offerings which combines a volume manager and RAID software into a single file system. Data protection levels can be from N+1 to N+4. N+4 for example can withstand a failure of four drives or even four nodes within the cluster without the user experiencing downtime or loss of data.
Performance impact of data protection is always a concern. The cluster design helps in generating data redundancy, rebuilding data in the event of a failure and maintaining user performance during that rebuild. As drive capacities continue to increase strategies will need to be employed to get around the limitations associated with RAID.
All in all the S-Series could be a compelling alternative to the high performance NAS offerings available from EMC and NetApp.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Today's briefing is on Isilon's new S-Series. Isilon has previously made its reputation with its X-Series line in markets that need highly scalable, highly concurrent sequential throughput storage and is now taking aim at the transactional IO, random access market with its first SAS drive based Scale-out NAS solution.
The Isilon S-Series is focused on higher random IO performance and lower latency. Like the other Isilon solutions this is a clustered storage solution in the purest sense of the word. The system scales out by using multiple 2U nodes all interconnected via a private inifiniband backbone. Each node has 12 450GB 15k SAS drives for 5.4TB of storage per node. For processing, each node has dual quad core processors,. Those 8 cores drive 16GB of RAM and 4 1GBE interfaces.
