Note to Presenter: Present tocustomers and prospects to provide them with a technical review of Isilon X400 and NL400 scale-out storage systems.The purpose of this presentation is to provide a technical review of the two newest additions to the Isilon scale-out storage systems portfolio: the Isilon X400 and Isilon NL400.
We’ll begin our discussion today with a brief overview of Isilon, after which we’ll describe the advantages of Isilon’s scale-out storage solutions. Following that, we’ll:Provide details on the new Isilon X400 and NL400 storage systems and explain how they can deliver a highly reliable and efficient storage solution for your growing Big Data environment.Review key architectural features and platform details of the X400 and NL400 and show how they compare to other Isilon storage systems (Note: this will be of particular interest to customers who already have some Isilon systems within their IT environmentProvide you with system views and configuration options Review a number of typical scenarios or use cases in which the X400 or NL400 can provide you with significant value.Conclude the session with suggestions on how you can get additional details about Isilon in general and, more specifically, the Isilon X400 and NL400.
Isilon scale-out storage systems are designed with a “no-compromise” architectural approach to enable you to scale your data storage capacity without sacrificing performance or data protection. In fact, Isilon systems enable you to scale both capacity and performance linearly, delivering on the “no-compromise” promise.To provide you with a highly economical storage solution, Isilon uses industry-standard components such as disk drives, Intel processors, and network I/O. These components are integrated into each of Isilon’s storage platform nodes. This approach helps you maximize the value from your storage infrastructure investment.Now let’s look at the overall Isilon storage platform portfolio.
Isilon hardware platforms are built on the innovative, “no-compromise,” Isilon scale-out storage architecture—designed for simplicity, value, best-in-class performance, and unmatched reliability. The Isilon platform portfolio is comprised of three flexible product lines tailored for specific business needs:Isilon S-Series:Designed for ultra-performance primary storage, the Isilon S-Series is an ideal solution for your high-transactional and I/Os per second (IOPS)-intensive applications. The Isilon S-Series presents the greatest IOPS price/performance advantage of Isilon scale-out NAS solutions in a super-high efficiency and ultra-low overhead package. Isilon X-Series:Isilon’s most flexible and comprehensive storage product line, the Isilon X-Series platform strikes the right balance between large capacity and high performance. The highly versatile X-Series is Isilon’s best overall solution for high throughput and high concurrency applications. Note to Presenter: Point out that the new Isilon X400 is the most powerful offering within the X-Series platform.Isilon NL-Series:The NL-Series is designed to provide cost-effective, highlyscalable nearline storage. High density, massive capacity, and maximum efficiency are the Isilon NL-Series’ strengths. The NL-Series offers the most economical price per terabyte of storage capacity and lowest overall TCO of Isilon scale-out storage solutions.Note to Presenter: Point out that the new Isilon NL400 provides the greatest storage capacity of the NL-Series platform offerings.Isilon also offers Performance Extension Nodes to accelerate performance and data backup.
Now let’s look at the new Isilon X400 and NL00 in more detail:Isilon X400: As the newest and most powerful of member of the Isilon X-Series product line, the Isilon X400 provides the highest combination of performance and storage capacity available for a scale-out NAS storage solution from EMC. The Isilon X400 is an ideal storage solution for high throughput and high concurrency applications in Big Data environments. Isilon NL400: The Isilon NL400, the newest addition to the Isilon NL-Series storage platform product line, provides the largest storage capacity along with a highly economical price per terabyte of capacity and the lowest overall TCO of any scale-out storage solution available from EMC. The Isilon NL400 is designed to provide cost-effective, highly scalable, nearline storage for Big Data environments. The Isilon X400 and NL400 both incorporate a modular, scale-out architecture that can be configured in a storage cluster of up to 144 nodes, with a storage capacity of up to 15.5 PB.
As the most powerful of member of the Isilon X-Series product line, the Isilon X400 provides the highest combination of performance and storage capacity and is very well suited to a number of general enterprise data storage needs, for example: Business analytics including Hadoop workflowsLarge-scale home directories for both Windows and UNIX data environmentsVirtualized infrastructure environments for Tier 3 and Tier 4 workloadsThe Isilon X400 is also very well suited to meeting the Big Data storage requirements found in a number of specific industry segments such as Healthcare (for medical imaging and PACs), Life Sciences (including genetic sequencing and large-scale microscopy environments), and Digital Media (including broadcast, post production), just to name a few.Along with massive scalability of up to 15.5PB per cluster, for each of these environments, the Isilon X400 is designed to deliver the following key benefits:High flexibility to support a broad range of performance and storage capacity requirementsOptimized performance for concurrent and streaming requirements and enabled by up to 27 TB of globally coherent cacheExcellent price/performance and TCOAnd like all Isilon scale-out storage systems, the Isilon X400 is highly efficient, easy to manage, and highly reliable and provides robust data protection options.
The Isilon NL400 combines Big Data storage capacity with a highly economical price per terabyte of capacity and the lowest overall TCO of any scale-out storage solution available. The Isilon NL400 is very well suited to a number of general enterprise data storage needs, including: Nearline archiving: For economical storage and rapid disk-based access to reference data to meet business and legal requirements.Disaster recovery: When combined with the Isilon SyncIQ replication application, the NL400 is an ideal solution for organizations whose multi-site replication strategy requires an economical, high-capacity storage device to be located remotely.Disk-to-disk backup: Can be combined with third-party compression and deduplication technology to deliver a highly scalable, reliable, easy-to-manage, and economical disk-based back-up target.Along with massive scalability of up to 15.5PB per cluster, for each of these environments, the Isilon NL400 is designed to deliver the following key benefits:Strong performance at a value priceOptimized for key storage needs, including nearline archiving, disaster recovery, and disk-to-disk backupHighly flexible storage configuration options, including choice of 36, 72, or 108 TB per node CPU to handle advanced operationsAnd like all Isilon scale-out storage systems, the Isilon NL400 is highly efficient, easy to manage, and highly reliable and provides robust data protection options.
Architecturally, Isilon’s scale-out architecture is underpinned by OneFS’s ability to see and control every piece of hardware in every node. This means cache coherency across all nodes, and a single volume and single file system that grows organically across all available capacity. Because OneFS can directly control operations across a large number of nodes and drives, there is less overhead needed to maintain data protection. Parity can be amortized over more drives than in a traditional RAID infrastructure allowing Isilon customers to regularly achieve >80 percent utilization. See the Isilon 80 percent guarantee online at: http://www.isilon.com/press-release/isilon-guarantees-value-and-simplicity-scale-out-NAS.Every node in the cluster has a balance of storage, processing, and capacity, so as nodes are added the cluster’s performance scales linearly. OneFS’s ability to control all hardware in the cluster means you can mix and match nodes of different performance, capacity, price balances under one volume and one file systema single point of management over various tiers of storage. This means you control your storage costs without sacrificing performance or data protection. The ability to combine nodes of different types in the same cluster also means you can add new technology as it becomes available and keep any supported nodes in the cluster for the ultimate in investment protection.In addition to node mix and match, Isilon supports all the most major network storage protocols and computer operating systems, so your storage environment can grow and change as your requirements do.
Isilon clusters eliminate single points of failure with data protection starting with customer configurable options for data protectionfrom mirroring 1 – 8x and options that allow protection against different node or drive failure combinations. Larger drives are straining traditional architecture’s ability to recover from a failure. The larger the drives in the system, the longer the rebuild time is because it’s throttled by a single controller pair’s bandwidth. The longer it takes to rebuild a drive, the higher the risk of additional failures during the rebuild time, which raises the overall protection level, lowering capacity utilization and driving up storage costs. Because OneFS can store parity data across many more drives in a cluster and rebuild using the processing capacity of multiple nodes, Isilon clusters boast the fastest rebuild times in the industry contributing even further to Isilon’s utilization advantages.To further protect data, Isilon’s SyncIQ delivers parallelized, asynchronous data replication for local or remote disaster recovery, disk-to-disk backup, or archival applications. And to protect data against accidental, premature, or malicious alteration or deletion, Isilon’s SmartLock software can be implemented on all or just a portion of an Isilon cluster so that general purpose, protected, and compliance data can be stored and managed without special-purpose hardware or administration required.
The Isilon X400 is a highly flexible platform for a broad range of performance/capacity points. It is optimized for concurrent and streaming performance and delivers excellent price/performance and TCO. These attributes make it ideally suited for multiple general-purpose applications such as business analytics, including Hadoop workflows; virtualized environments; and large-scale Home Directories.The NL400 is nearline storage that delivers near-primary performance at near-tape cost. The primary use cases for the NL400 are nearline archiving, disaster recovery, and disk-to-disk backup.
To give you an idea of the system internals, here you see the systems side by side. Both systems are 4u, both have 36 SATA drives, and both have 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB drive options.Differences are mostly around performance. The X400 has significantly more CPU and memory and can include SSDs for metadata or data.
Here is a comparison of the new X400 and NL400 with their legacy counterparts.The main differences are that the new nodes are configure to order. You can select drive, memory, and networking options. They have larger memory options and newer, more powerful processors. Also of note is that the new systems will accommodate 4 TB drives when those drives become available.
This is a view of the rear of the X400/NL400. Note the redundant power supplies and batteries. In addition to your choice of 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)and 10 Gigabit Ethernet network connectivity, there are also standard USB and Serial connections. The Infiniband connections are exclusively for the back-end cluster infrastructure and are not available for general network traffic.
We looked at all the individual options for the systems in previous slides, so to make it easy to see how the systems ship, here is a list of base configurations for each system showing base memory and disk combinations. Here you see the system base capacities for the 1, 2, and 3 TB drives are the 36 TB, 72 TB, and 108 TB across both the X400 and the NL400. On the X400, you have additional options with SSDs.
And, here is a summary of all the configuration and upgrade options available for each platform.As you can see, the X400 and the NL400 are powerful new additions to the Isilon scale-out NAS family. For concurrent and streaming performance, great price/performance, and strong TCO, the X-Series is the obvious choice. For nearline storage that delivers near-primary performance at near-tape cost, the NL excels at nearline archiving, disaster recovery, and disk-to-disk backup.
