Scale-out storage systems have proven to be a perfect remedy for coping with the flood of unstructured data inundating enterprise IT. Whether it’s user home directories, email system repositories or rich media file shares, scale-out arrays, where capacity can be quickly increased by adding Lego-like storage nodes, have proven to be easier to deploy and scale than traditional big iron storage systems.
When it comes to scale out, EMC was quick to recognize the shifting technology landscape by scooping up Isilon more than two years ago. While Isilon supplied the base technology, quickly becoming the most popular scale-out systems in the market, this year’s EMC World demonstrates the EMC influence coming through in a big way. The company is introducing a new version of the OS, oneFS; breaking out of the traditional scale-out usage silos; and positioning modular storage systems such as Isilon to be key components in a new era of software-defined storage and big-data applications. As such, the big news about Isilon at this year’s EMC World has nothing to do with new hardware and is all about adding new software features.
As we outlined in this Network Computing column detailing EMC’s major software-defined storage product, ViPR, Isilon arrays can be full participants in virtualized, heterogenous storage pools that can include everything from high-performance VMAX and VNX arrays to Atmos private cloud object stores. But it’s now clear that Isilon is inheriting other strands of EMC’s enterprise DNA as several features of the upgraded oneFS are atypical for scale-out systems.