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Isilon… anybody?
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John,
every company that you mentioned, that you feel is “limited in expandability” makes no sense.Most vendors are using SAS host adaptor cards from ATTO or Areca (EditShare uses LSI Logic). These cards (like the ATTO R680) can run 128 physical volumes, or 8 16bay chassis. If you put 4TB drives inside the chassis, this means that you can have 512 TB (1/2 pedabyte) on a single server. Need a full pedabyte, put in a second server, and connect both servers (via 10gig card) to a switch, and now all of your users have a Pedabyte of storage, with only 2 servers.
I cannot even imagine what your application is. All the companies talked about on Creative Cow can do exactly what you want. You don’t need Isilon (not unless you want to feel like a “big boy”). I work for huge corporations, and no one is using Isilon (well, I don’t work for Apple, but the iCloud site in North Carolina is all Isilon chassis).
Bob Zelin
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Hi Bob,
By expandability I mean expanding existing volumes without reformatting or loosing capacity when adding a larger chassis. I think the industry term for this is “scale out”. This is one of the issues we face with Xsan. Deploying new volumes makes sense to a point, but we’re at a point where we have enough volumes and need each volume to grow.
Scale out is where nobody can really touch Isilon. It was designed with that forefront along with chassis redundancy. GBLabs can be built in a way that lets you add disparate chassis sizes as well as chassis redundancy, but is requires a rather complex deployment. Islion even allows replacement of an older chassis without interruption.
Performance is really the question as far as realtime “do or die” ingest goes. EMC claims many media installations but many times it’s the consumer streaming side which is the case with MLB. David had no complains so that is really the first good report I heard first hand.
One can certainly build a faster small system with GBLabs as each Isilon node is only capable of 740MB/sec while GBLabs is 1400MB. Even worse – Isilon is a round robin write, much like Xsan storage pools, so no request could exceed 740MB while GBLabs will scale to a point.
Cost of course is the main issue with Isilon per Terabyte. The minimum system is a 3 node cluster in which case you loose 1/3 of capacity. Add to that the fact it has to grow in 3 node blocks, so with 3TB drives that’s an expensive big 200TB block. The nice thing about it is it gets more efficient and resilient the more nodes are added. The exact opposite of Xsan/StorNext.
David pointed out Coraid https://www.coraid.com/products/high_performance_nas which may have the best of GBLabs and Isilon with some compromises.
We’re really in the investigation stage but see the future being NAS.
John
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[Bob Zelin] “I don’t work for Apple”
Which is why, in the long run, they’re doomed.
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Had about a week of training on EqualLogic arrays (somewhat similar to Isilon), and it’s just a different animal from DAS, NAS, SAN boxes that I was used to.
Like David said, expandability: not just the petabytes, but how it’s done. Add a chassis full of drives (to the iSCSI subnet), sign in to management, add it to the pool. You’re done. You could still do a few things but the main idea is that its capacity is instantly available. No RAID expansion, no adding controllers and HBAs, no restarting the system.
Resiliency. If your primary chassis goes up in smoke, sign in to management (yes, it’s transparently available through surviving members of the group), add or order a spare chassis, keep working as if nothing happened. Try that with any regular DAS, SAN or NAS.
There’s a bunch of other things that enterprises often need: automatic snapshots, 1- and 2-way replication, tiering. All that costs a pretty penny, too, of course – five to twenty times the cost per GB vs. “regular Joe” DAS and NAS boxes.
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Just some corrections on Isilon –
1) you can grow to any number of nodes (not a multiple of 3), but three is the minimum per NODE TYPE. Meaning, you need a minimum of 3 NL nodes for an NL cluster. But you can add just one if you like to get a 4 node NL cluster.
2) On performance, I don’t know any specific numbers to their current offerings (mine is 4 years old now), but I know you can add performance by adding S or X Series devices, and you can also add a “performance accelerator” node.
3) The cost isn’t just the “per tb” costs, but also the per year costs. Their support costs are unbelievable. My cluster is now unsupported and ready to be put to rest as soon as I can replace it with something cheaper.(Anyone wanna buy a 20TB Isilon cluster? Didn’t think so…)
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EqualLogic is a block (iSCSI) rather than a NAS solution, so a very different beast to Isilon. It does offer some limited scale out, but like similar ‘scale-out’ iSCSI such as HP LeftHand once you have a couple of dozen nodes management and performance start to become ‘challenging’.
Isilon is not for people who buy just on cost per GB, but rather it does three things really well: scales capacity (up to >20PB in a single files system), scales performance (many many GB/s) and is very easy to manage. Very little, if anything else, does all three well. For that capability there is a cost, so not for everyone, but from a pure NAS perspective it is perhaps the coolest tech out there.Cheers,
JR
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