Optimize Scale-out Storage Performance and Availability

SmartConnect™ allows IT Managers to meet the demands of an always-on, 24x7x365 world by ensuring the highest levels of performance and industry leading high availability. With intelligent client connection load balancing and failover support, SmartConnect optimizes Isilon scale-out storage performance and availability.

Through a single host name, SmartConnect enables client connection load balancing and dynamic NFS failover and failback of client connections across storage nodes to provide optimal utilization of the cluster resources. Without the need to install client side drivers, administrators can easily manage a large and growing number of clients and rest assured that in the event of a system failure, in flight reads and writes will successfully finish without failing.

Optimize Performance

• In the event of a storage head failure traditional storage architectures with two-way failover typically sustain at least a 50% degradation in performance as clients must fail over to the remaining head.  With Isilon, during failover, clients are evenly distributed across all remaining nodes in the cluster ensuring minimal performance impact.

High Availability

• SmartConnect supports dynamic NFS failover for Linux and UNIX clients, ensuring in the event of a node failure, all in-flight reads and writes are handed off to another node in the cluster without any interruption to users or applications.

Scalability

• Clients and storage nodes can be added and the cluster can be scaled without disruption while the system is in production, even in computing intensive environments.

With its intelligent client connection load balancing and NFS failover support, SmartConnect achieves breakthrough levels of performance and availability, enabling IT Managers to meet the ever-increasing demands being placed on them to ensure always-on, always-available performance from their Isilon clustered storage solutions.