UPDATED 11:55 EDT / FEBRUARY 29 2012

EMC on How Scale-Out NAS, Isilon Fits into the Big Data Picture

Storage giant EMC released a couple of short best practice videos in which Nick Kirsch, Isilon’s Director of Product Management, talks over the five main highlights of this technology. Isilon is one of the company’s main assets as it progresses further and further towards the whole big data trend, and these videos – along with the stuff EMC has been up to recently – provide a rather good outline of it all.

In the first video Kirsch lays out the five main principles behind scale-out NAS. The first bulletin is simplicity, and its maintenance at scale, followed by predictability. This is also a requirement that applies to scaling a deployment in general.

Next up in EMC’s list is efficiency.   Kirsch points at a utilization rate of at least 80 percent, which is evidently what Isilon technology is gunning for, in addition to storage tiering. The latter enables the use of technologies such as flash, SAS and other solutions that aim to reduce overheads on the bottom line while boosting performance. Companies like Fusion-io are a very good example of how that has been working out so far.

Point number four is availability, a very-self explanatory demand. And the fifth is a combination of all of the above, and the ability to make the scale-out NAS technologically enterprise ready. This means snapshots, replications and other processes that should be able to work in a proper scalable environment.

The follow-up video, a bit shorter than the first, also features EMC’s Nick Kirsch but instead focuses on the five things enterprises don’t want from traditional, scale-out NAS copycat architectures.

EMC’s commitment to storage that can handle more data than before has been expanding rather rapidly. Last month we covered the announcement of Isilon’s support of Hadoop Distributed File System protocol natively, meaning that any company can run any distribution of Hadoop on an Isilon storage system.  EMC Greenplum HD analytics is therefore very easily integrated with an Isilon storage system, making EMC the first and only end-to-end Hadoop solution – from storage to analytics – that is enterprise-ready.   It’s an important area of growth for EMC, which is also looking to secure its place in the post-PC era’s security needs.


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