Dell EMC Unveils Isilon All-Flash to Provide a Smooth Digital Business

Dell EMC announced a new member of the Dell EMC Isilon product family, combining the high performance of flash technology with the industry’s #1 scale-out NAS platform. Isilon All-Flash is designed to help IT organizations modernize their infrastructure and deliver on the capabilities of a digital business.

Traditionally, all flash array (AFA) products have focused primarily on structured or block data sets and applications that support approximately 20% of all data in the data center. However, there is a growing imperative for IT to harness the value of unstructured data, which now accounts for 80% of all new data produced, managed and stored by enterprises today.

To do this, organizations are using increasingly powerful next-generation applications and workloads that require high performance to process massive unstructured data sets and deliver the accelerated business outcomes enterprises demand. Dell EMC sees this unstructured data opportunity as the final flash frontier that requires a scale-out architecture designed to take advantage of flash media and provide the same enterprise-grade data protection, management, access and security that these unstructured data applications require today.

Dell EMC is addressing this shift with the new Isilon All-Flash scale-out family of NAS storage. It has combined the extreme performance of flash technology with the proven scalability, true multi-protocol access and security of Isilon OneFS operating system. Formerly known as “Project Nitro,” the highly-dense, bladed-node architecture of Isilon All-Flash provides four Isilon nodes within a single 4U chassis with capacity options ranging from 92TB to 924TB per chassis. Available in several configurations, Isilon All-Flash units can be combined into a single cluster that provides up to 92.4PB of capacity and over 1.5TB/s of aggregate performance.

“As businesses move towards a digital future, there is an increasing need to support large-scale workloads that utilize unstructured data at unprecedented speeds. This can’t be done with hardware alone—software is the key to enabling customers to modernize their data centers, and the determining factor for the winners and losers in the All-Flash market,” said Phil Bullinger, SVP of Isilon at Dell EMC.

“Isilon All-Flash is specifically designed to address the need for extreme NAS performance, but also to provide the multi-protocol access, enterprise-grade data protection, security and ease of management capabilities that organizations expect from the industry’s #1 scale-out NAS solution," he added.

Isilon All-Flash storage is designed for a wide range of next-generation applications and unstructured workloads that require extreme NAS performance including, 4K streaming of data, genomic sequencing, electronic design automation and near real-time analytics with a choice of Big Data analytics vendors such as Hortonworks, Cloudera, Pivotal, IBM and Splunk.

Isilon All-Flash can be deployed as a new cluster, or can seamlessly integrate with existing Isilon clusters to accelerate the performance of an enterprise data lake and lower the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) of a multi-tiered all flash and high capacity SATA solution. Powered by the OneFS operating system, this new offering from Dell EMC is designed to provide the essential capabilities that enterprises require to modernize IT: extreme performance, massive scalability, operational flexibility, increased efficiency, and enterprise-grade data protection and security.