Isilon – breaking through to the street

Isilon is an emerging vendor that has developed a clustered storage system focused on digital content. They are about to go public and I hope that Wall Street will understand what they bring to the table. It is easy for people to conclude that Isilon is directly competing with NetApp and EMC. Certainly Isilon will bump into these guys. But Isilon has built a solution that is differentiated and has applied their advantages to a market where neither EMC nor NetApp are dominant. That is the beauty of their strategy. Isilon is a leader in their market and the other guys are at a disadvantage. Isilon's market includes digital storage from media and entertainment, oil and gas research, life sciences, advanced engineering, and online services.

Isilon on many levels epitomizes what I consider to be a next generation storage system. It is the easiest storage system out of the gate and over its lifecycle. Their customers use it to store digital content -- files, images, and streaming media. Some of their customers use it as a core part of their business to do research and analysis; others use it to provide digital content as a part of a service to their customers; others use it as a digital archive to store lots and lots of unstructured data.

Their fundamental architecture is core to their value, which they continually leverage to add more compelling capabilities.

Isilon has three important core elements.

1. The Isilon storage system is easy. In fact it is the easiest storage system we have ever tested (and we have tested a bunch). Storage systems can start out easy but then quickly become more complex as you add more file systems. Isilon provides a solution that is easy initially and also over the continuum as the business requirements change over time, which more often than not becomes more demanding.

2. Scalability is another Isilon core element and is conjointly associated with being "easy". Isilon provides scalability through its true clustering technology and extensible file system. Its ability to cluster three or more controller nodes (today up to 96 nodes and a 1 PB file system) in a single logical storage system enables customers to grow as needed without increasing complexity. Additionally, having a single file system that expands as you add more storage to the cluster greatly simplifies management. You have one thing to manage versus many (simple law of physics). When you factor in true clustering and a single extensible file system the result is a storage system that remains easy over the continuum regardless of its size.

3. The third core element for Isilon is performance. The Isilon cluster enables the aggregation of all its resources including processors, bandwidth, cache memory and disk drives. Everything works in parallel to serve I/O requests. And since you can scale the Isilon cluster you also scale performance. This also makes Isilon easier over the continuum, since little to no performance tuning is required. The entire Isilon cluster works in concert for constant optimal performance.

Isilon has all the ingredients to be "the next NetApp". Like NetApp, their core value is in the software and as such they can compete effectively and avoid margin erosion. It will be interesting to see what happens with Isilon going public. Riverbed has been very successful, but they aren't really storage. Xyratex is a storage vendor that went public a couple of years back and is also doing well. But they have a much different business model and product set. Isilon ushers in a next generation storage system that uses commodity hardware and focuses heavily on its software capability and architecture. It is a very compelling solution that in the short term offers a differentiated and competitive storage solution. The longer term implications are they can potentially re-invent the way storage is done. Additionally, Isilon is a great company. They know how to execute. And that is another reason why they could be the next NetApp.

I think every end user company and organization should have at least one Isilon IQ storage system, whether you want to use it for some grand, important, strategic business reason - or you just want a cost effective, easy to use storage system to keep all of your files. If you have other storage systems in your data center, it would be good to have Isilon IQ just to see how much easier the system is than any other. Especially as your environment grows. If you don't have any other network storage system, you will be pleased with how easy it is and that it didn't create any additional management issues or require any more technical resources.