SnapShotIQ

Simple, Scalable and Flexible Protection

With the ability to support an unlimited number of snapshots within a single pool of Isilon storage and up to 1,024 snapshots within any single directory, SnapshotIQ™ represents a significant advancement over traditional snapshot technology.With SnapShotIQ, snapshots are locally retained, read-only and incorruptible point-in-time images of data that reliably distribute an unlimited number of snapshots across Isilon storage nodes.

Isilon snapshots are highly scalable and typically take less than one second to create, incurring little to no performance overhead - regardless of the size of the file system, the directory being snapshot, or the level of production activity on the cluster. Only changes to blocks that make up a file are reflected in updates to the current version of snapshots, resulting in highly-efficient snapshot storage utilization.

Snapshots should be simple

Traditional volume-based snapshots, fundamentally unchanged since their creation in the mid-1990s, are limited to a single storage device and a single volume, with a limited number of snapshots that can be taken.  If the gap between scheduled snapshots is too great, changes to files or directories will not be captured and data protection suffers.

SnapshotIQ closes the gaps between snapshot schedules, giving you more flexibility to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives.  Isilon SnapshotIQ breaks the one-to-one lock between a snapshot and a storage system and can support an unlimited number of snapshots within a single pool of storage and up to 1,024 snapshots within any single directory.

Data Protection

• SnapshotIQ provides near instantaneous, secure, user-initiated and managed data restores. Users can directly access snapshots to recover from accidental deletions, corruptions or modifications of their data.
• Isilon’s snapshots are locally retained, read-only and incorruptible point-in-time images of data that reliably distribute an unlimited number of snapshots across multiple Isilon storage nodes.
• SnapshotIQ provides the ability to conduct frequent, low-impact, user-recoverable backups of files. Isilon snapshots vastly improve the frequency and reliability of backups, since they incur minimal performance overhead and can be safely created on a production cluster.

Simple Management

• The single volume and single namespace of Isilon storage means you don’t have to manage snapshots across different volumes, across multiple storage systems and across multiple file systems – eliminating the need to move directory structures or data between file systems and volumes.
• Isilon snapshot technology allows you to snapshot precisely only the data you want, when you want, eliminating the need to snapshot the entire volume.
• With SnapshotIQ, you can easily move directories, assign resources and change directory names while preserving snapshot integrity and logical access to the snapshots.
• SnapShotIQ virtually eliminates the challenge of monitoring to ensure sufficient storage space is available for snapshots. As needed, you can add capacity and/or performance to an Isilon cluster easily and transparently, without having to replicate or delete snapshots to free up space.

Efficiency

• One of the largest IT costs associated with backup and restore is the sheer number of help desk calls from end-users who accidentally delete a file or directory.   The integration of SnapShotIQ with Microsoft’s® Shadow Copies for Shared Folders client for Windows®, enables users to easily find and restore their own accidentally deleted files or folders—without any IT intervention. Users remain productive and IT-operator intervention is virtually eliminated.
• Once a baseline snapshot has been established, only changes to blocks that make up a file are reflected in updates to the current version of snapshots, ensuring highly efficient snapshot storage utilization.

Isilon’s powerful, yet simple storage solutions, store massive amounts of data in a single file system, boost storage performance and enable the consolidation of applications and workflows.