Simplicity at Scale

Enterprise data centers are rapidly adopting virtualized server environments for enhanced utilization and efficiency, lower costs, and increased flexibility to deliver applications and compute resources on demand. While virtualization has enhanced the efficiency of servers in the data center, it has magnified the challenges associated with traditional SAN or scale-up NAS storage solutions, often nullifying the anticipated cost savings and management advantages.  Instead of realizing the efficiencies from virtualization, you end up pouring more resources into your storage environment–with more staff required to manage the system complexity and over-provision storage.

With traditional SAN or scale-up NAS in a virtualized environment, the complexity of volume sprawl, capacity and load balancing, mount management and other storage administration adds to management time, slowing deployments and taking resources from business critical support. Add in the effort required to smoothly and non-disruptively scale the environment when more storage or performance is needed, the shortcomings of traditional SAN or scale-up NAS storage solutions are clear.

In the same way virtualization has eliminated server sprawl, the Isilon Scale-out storage platform eliminates storage sprawl and provides a superior solution for virtualized environments. With Isilon, the ability to scale-out is built into our platform and with a single volume, single file system and single namespace, storage is simple to manage, no matter the size of your storage environment.

Simplicity

Isilon scale-out storage eliminates complex storage management tasks, such as chasing hot-spots and migrating VMs, so you can focus on achieving the greatest gains from virtualized server environments.

Scalability

Each Isilon cluster is designed as a fully symmetric storage system and is by nature extremely dynamic. An Isilon cluster can scale to 144 nodes with capacity from terabytes to petabytes in a single file system.

Efficiency

Isilon delivers over 80% storage utilization without degrading performance.

Agility

In a dynamic environment where VMs are added daily, Isilon enables you to add capacity and/or performance without downtime or disruption. When a storage node is added to an Isilon cluster the additional capacity, performance and connectivity is immediately available and shared across all virtualized data stores.

Isilon Certifications

Isilon is certified VMware Ready for vSphere ™ 4.0 and is also a Citrix Ready partner.

"We found traditional storage was too complex and inefficient to support a highly virtualized environment. By deploying Isilon, our VMware solution now has the ideal storage architecture, enabling us to eliminate storage complexity and gain efficiency." Brian Hourigan, senior technical manager, Webair