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At the recent VMworld 2010 conference in San Francisco, Isilon told the media that it has integrated the popular iSCSI block-level protocol into its file-based OneFS storage operating system, amounting to a unified scale-out storage platform for the enterprise.
In short, Isilon now enables users to consolidate both file- and block-based applications into one shared pool of virtualized storage. Now that makes things a lot easier, doesn’t it? No more separate apps for separate workloads. A storage engineer’s dream, no doubt.
Isilon is already well-known within the industry for supplying high-capacity storage systems to entertainment and media companies, government and science institutions, and health care systems.
Isilon’s new iSCSI functionality already supports most standard file-based protocols, including CIFS, NFS, HTTP and FTP. iSCSI is an additional serving of dessert.
Using Isilon, enterprises now can configure, manage, clone, thin provision, snapshot, tier, replicate and secure LUNs using one pane of glass — and eliminating the whole idea of SAN- and NAS-based systems. Pretty radical stuff here.
Unified file and block-level data access from a single system, Isilon eliminates the data fragmentation and low resource utilization common with traditional SAN and NAS in virtualized environments, enabling enterprise businesses to maximize the benefits of server virtualization.
“The adoption of virtualization and the need to consistently reduce costs are currently significant factors in enterprise IT strategy, making data storage solutions that simplify management, consolidate applications and minimize expenses key to IT efficiency going forward,” Gartner Research Director Pushan Rinnen said.
Looks like Isilon may be on to something.