EMC expands NAS for big data

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 April 2011 11:32

EMC has released new models in its Isilon family of NAS devices which are optimised for processing large amounts of data.

A growing number of organisations are processing vast amounts of data. Once the concern of scientific researchers and financial analysts, a much wider range of disciplines are seeking insight and action from the data massive data collections that are becoming commonplace.

EMC's Isilon division focuses on highly-scalable yet easy to manage NAS systems. Its latest models as the S200 and X200.

The S200 promises over 1.4 million NFS ops and over 85GBps of aggregate throughput from a single file system. Hardware features include quad-core Xeon 5600 processors, STEC SSD and Hitachi SAS drives, 10 gigabit Ethernet, and 13.8 TB of globally coherent cache. Application areas include design and simulation, digital media, financial analysis and high performance computing workflows.

The X200 promises more than 30 GBps of aggregate throughput with utilisation of at least 80 percent, and is aimed at cloud computing, life sciences, Internet services and large-scale virtualised environments.

"We tested Isilon's new S200 in our high-IOPS rendering environment and achieved over 100,000 simultaneous metadata operations, a huge improvement over previous generations," said beta tester Nick Bali, senior software engineer at visual effects company Sony Imageworks. "The performance increase is so dramatic, we've already placed an order for these new Isilon nodes, adding to the primary and archive Isilon clusters we already have in production."

And there's new software to go with the S200 and X200 - see page 2.