Isilon one million, the fastest Scale Out NAS

-140 Isilon S200 Nodes.
-One Volume.
-One File System.
-One Million+ IOPS for the SPECsfs 2008 CIFS and SPECsfs 2008 NFS Benchmarks.
But first a proof point. Unlike many of it’s competitors Isilon aggregates system resources in every node to provide linear scalability. To show this the team tested 7, 14, 28, 56 and 140 nodes by powering them on as required.

Over the course of the testing for NFS each node averaged about 8,100 IOPS/Node and 11,500 IOPS/Node for CIFS. Note, the NFS and CIFS benchmarks aren’t the same (While the platform configuration was.) so the numbers aren’t comparable to one another.

They are however comparable to everyone else who has run the same benchmark. But not everyone who’s submitted for one has submitted for the other and those who do can submit results from two different configurations.

In Isilon’s case it’s the same configuration with the same number of nodes for each benchmark. Lets net out the published CIFS numbers to see how they stack up.

126% higher than it’s nearest competitor and significantly higher than all Isilon’s published competitors.

Plotting the NFS results we have Isilon 75% higher than their nearest competitor and significantly higher than all their published competitors.

But when we look at the numbers on a per file system basis we end with with something really interesting. Isilon is using a single file system in both benchmarks while many of it’s competitors are using multiple file systems due to ghastly volume size limitations or architectures which cannot aggregate system resources and as a result require the use of multiple file systems to prevent a single controller from becoming a massive bottleneck.

With some quick mathematics run on the published numbers Isilon is shown to be more than 1700% faster on a per file system basis than it’s closest competitor and close to 5000% faster than a volume size challenged competitor on the CIFS benchmark.

So, through this repeatable benchmark what have we learned?

1: Isilon requires only One file system regardless of the workload type.

PROVEN.
2: Isilon OneFS aggregates systems resources and provides linear scalability.

PROVEN.
3: This linear scalability allows Isilon to deliver IOPS to CIFS & NFS workloads at a massive rate.

PROVEN.
Isilon, with a file system spanning all nodes in a cluster, the ability to move tasks between all system resources in the cluster and the ability to control redundancy down to the level of an individual file, is far and away the leader in Scale Out NAS.

And with the growth of File storage projected to far outstrip the growth of Block storage over the next ten years this is The Decade Of Isilon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1OT06ooGhc&feature=player_embedded

This article and its expressed opinions are sourced by Storagezilla which can be found here.