Isilon Systems is adding Solid State Drives to their S- and X-series products. Unlike other manufacturers, Isilon is specifically targeting SSDs for use in metadata storage; apparently these are currently a bottleneck in some systems.
“As the next-generation data center becomes a reality, SSDs are already playing a critical role in transforming enterprise data storage,” said Sam Grocott, VP of Marketing, Isilon Systems. “However, the majority of today’s enterprise data centers are not yet fully equipped with the technology ecosystem or the budget to adopt all-SSD systems. By leveraging SSDs in combination with SAS or SATA drives, we are delivering products that address the core needs of the mainstream enterprise, while simultaneously minimizing costs.”
The SSDs are available in the new 5000S-SSD, 10000X-SSD and 320000X-ssd. According to Isilon, the new products will offer an 8x improvement in latency and 2x improvement in IOPS performance. The list price for the new products starts at $59.000 per 5000S-SSD node, or $65.000 per node for the 10000X-SSD. The most expensive system is the 32000X-SSD with a per-node price tag of $125.000 per node.
It looks like Isilon didn’t make any major changes to incorporate SSDs; the 5000S-SSD looks like a 5400S with a HDD swapped for a 100GB SSD. The 10000X-SSD is a 12000X with two drives swapped for SSDs, and the 32000X-SSD looks like a 36000X with four SSDs.
Isilon also announced their first SSD-using customer today; ARM is using a 10000X-SSD to decrease replication times for their filers. Replication to a secondary site now takes two hours instead of 17; since Isilon is claiming an 8x speed improvement for metadata operations, and finding changed files is mostly using metadata, I guess their old, slow system was also made by Isilon. In any case, ARM is a happy customer once again:
“Our business never stops – ’round the clock’ doesn’t begin to describe the rate at which we design, manufacture and bring to market the technology companies around the world use to power digital devices and networks,” said Mark Burrows, IT operations manager, ARM. “As such, data loss is simply not an option. We need to replicate our chip design data at the speed of our business and with Isilon’s unique implementation of SSDs we can do exactly that, and at much less cost than was previously possible.”
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