New Isilon Innovations…The Answer to Today’s “Transformation Squeeze”

Today’s IT pros are caught in “transformation squeeze” — trapped between the traditional expectations of building and maintaining robust technical infrastructures while needing to drive new business value through deployment of next-generation applications and workflows. To help enterprises cope with today’s scalability and operational challenges while preparing for future next-gen cloud, Big Data analytics and mobility challenges, EMC is simultaneously deepening the enterprise readiness of its core Isilon scale-out architecture AND facilitating customers’ transformation to next-generation applications.

The next version of Isilon’s industry-leading operating system (available toward the end of 2013) will include data deduplication capabilities and audit features, plus enhancements for object-oriented storage and Hadoop HDFS 2.0.  Meeting the challenges of today while future-proofing storage investments for tomorrow — that’s EMC innovation at work.

To support more demanding applications and workloads across the enterprise, the next version of EMC’s Isilon OneFS will be capable of enabling storage administrators to configure a simple set-and-forget block-level deduplication policy ranging from individual directories up through the complete storage pool. By automating greater levels of storage efficiency across datasets, organizations can further reduce operating costs while enhancing utilization levels.

In addition, the next release of OneFS will bring important enterprise enhancements for regulatory compliance. Isilon OneFS integrated support for the EMC Common Event Enabler (CEE) will provide API access by industry-leading third-party file management software tools, including audit applications, to record all file access over SMB/CIFS protocols and facilitate report creation and chain of custody tracking to meet regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

EMC is also providing these OS enhancements to support next-generation workflows and applications focused on cloud-based data access, Big Data analytics and mobility:

  • Integration with EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage, through which EMC will extend the unmatched scalability and efficiency of its Isilon scale-out architecture to object storage. This integration opens up new options for access to object storage APIs from Amazon S3, EMC Atmos and OpenStack Swift.
  • For customers deploying the OpenStack ecosystem and requiring storage integration, EMC will support OpenStack Swift and Cinder integration natively on Isilon, delivering an enterprise-class storage solution, increasing reliability, security, efficiency and enterprise interoperability.
  • OneFS now incorporates an object-oriented REST Object Access to Namespace interface which provides access to data and is part of the Platform API, enabling automation, orchestration and management of Isilon storage.
  • As the first storage solution to offer a native integration with HDFS for big data analytics, Isilon continues its leadership by adding a native HDFS 2.0 integration.  This new integration supports both Pivotal HD 2.0  for SQL queries on the Hadoop data store and Cloudera CDH4 distribution.
  • Isilon’s recent on-premise storage integration with Syncplicity online file sharing improves business productivity by offering a flexible, cloud-based solution with the IT management visibility required for enterprise-level control over data and storage resources.

The next version of OneFS will be delivered toward the end of 2013. The object-oriented RAN, HDFS 2.0 and Syncplicity on Isilon are available today and will also be supported on the next version of OneFS.

Sam Grocott

About the Author: Sam Grocott

Sam Grocott is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. He leads the marketing activities for all infrastructure and client solutions and the services portfolio, including critical GTM activities across the portfolio, such as AI, APEX & Multicloud, Edge, Telecom, portfolio marketing and competitive intelligence. Sam began his career at Isilon Systems in 2001, where he led product management and helped launch Isilon's first products in 2003. After EMC acquired Isilon in 2010, Sam headed the marketing and product management team that delivered the market-leading scale-out NAS offering. When Dell acquired EMC in 2016, Sam's role expanded to cover the Dell Infrastructure Solutions portfolio for Marketing. The organization evolved to represent the entire Dell Technologies portfolio a few years later.