Isilon Systems
| Company type | Public (until acquisition) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer storage |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Founder | Sujal Patel, Paul Mikesell |
| Defunct | 2010 |
| Fate | Acquired by EMC Corporation |
| Headquarters | Seattle , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Sujal Patel (CEO) |
| Products | Scale-out network-attached storage solutions, OneFS file system |
| Parent | EMC Corporation (from 2010), later Dell EMC |
Isilon—currently known as PowerScale—is a scale out network-attached storage solution developed by Dell EMC for managing large-scale storage, backup, and archiving of unstructured data. It features a cluster-oriented storage array built on commodity hardware, capable of scaling to 50 petabytes within a single filesystem through its FreeBSD-based OneFS file system.
An Isilon cluster is composed of at least three nodes, each operating as a server running proprietary OneFS software that consolidates all nodes into a unified shared storage environment.
Isilon Systems
Established in 2001 by Sujal Patel and Paul Mikesell, Isilon Systems was headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The firm specialized in clustered file system hardware and software engineered for digital content management and unstructured data markets.
The company went public on December 16, 2006, distributing its products through a network exceeding 100 resellers alongside direct sales efforts. Its clientele included prominent organizations such as NBC Universal, Cedars-Sinai, Kelman Technologies, and Kodak.
After experiencing underwhelming results post-IPO, Sujal Patel reassumed the CEO role in 2007. An internal review prompted a restatement of earnings in 2008. Shortly before reaching its inaugural profitable year, Isilon Systems was acquired by EMC Corporation in November 2010 for $2.25 billion.
Isilon after merger
EMC indicated that acquiring Isilon strengthened its storage solutions portfolio for both private and public cloud infrastructures, emphasizing big data use cases like gene sequencing, streaming media, and seismic exploration in the oil and gas sector. At the time of acquisition, Isilon served clients including Sony, XM Radio, LexisNexis, Facebook, MySpace, Adobe, as well as leading film studios and television broadcasters.
On November 10, 2015, EMC broadened its Isilon NAS offerings by introducing a compact software-defined storage system tailored for remote locations, a cloud migration tool, and enhanced high-availability features for Isilon OneFS. These software products—IsilonSD Edge and CloudPools—were launched alongside an updated OneFS version in 2016 as part of EMC’s data lake initiative aimed at managing unstructured data repositories. They catered to enterprises requiring rapid analytics capabilities spanning the edge, core, and cloud tiers of their Data Lakes.
Dell EMC unveiled a new generation of Isilon systems on May 8, 2017, built on the modular "Infinity" architecture. This design delivered up to six times higher IOPS performance, elevenfold throughput improvements, and doubled capacity compared to previous models. The architecture supports scalable component upgrades; drive density rose to 60 drives per 4U rack unit—almost twice the prior density—and permits CPU and drive replacements without swapping entire nodes. Additionally, up to four nodes can be installed blade-style within a single 4U chassis.
With the release of OneFS 9.0 in June 2020, the product family was rebranded as "PowerScale," reflecting Dell EMC’s strategic move to separate OneFS software from hardware platforms and better address unstructured data workloads with increased flexibility.
Technology and architecture
Isilon’s clustered storage architecture consists of autonomous nodes integrated under the OneFS distributed file system. These systems are compatible with standard data center infrastructure and support Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac OS environments via common file sharing protocols over Gigabit or 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks. Node communication occurs over a dedicated 10Gb Ethernet LAN (with legacy configurations using Infiniband). Each node maintains full read/write access to a single scalable file system.
For data protection, Reed–Solomon error correction is employed to distribute files across nodes with parity calculated according to specified protection levels. The platform offers multi-protocol access including NFS, SMB, FTP alongside HDFS for Hadoop analytics on stored data. Files can be written using one protocol yet accessed through another seamlessly. Core elements encompass the OneFS operating system, NAS design principles, scale-out data lakes capability, and enterprise-grade features.
EMC’s collaboration with Cloudera facilitates direct sales of Cloudera Enterprise Hadoop via EMC’s channels. This partnership benefits EMC Isilon customers by enabling advanced analytics on their existing data lakes through Impala—the open-source massively parallel SQL query engine developed by Cloudera for Hadoop environments.
Awards and recognition
- In Gartner’s January 2015 report titled "Critical Capabilities for Scale-Out File System Storage," EMC Isilon achieved the top overall rating among nine competitors, praised for its scalable capacity, high performance, straightforward deployment, and comprehensive features.
- EMC was recognized as a leader in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays, noted for its visionary management, quick responsiveness, and assertive market approach.
- The scale-out NAS product lines of EMC Isilon were prominently included in ComputerWeekly’s 2014 evaluation of the "big six" storage array manufacturers.