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Isilon clusters having swell time

Amazing what software can do. In May, Isilon's maximum capacity was 3.5 petabytes per cluster. Now, with new software, it can grow to over 5PB. Isilon sells scale-out NAS clusters with each IQ node running the OneFS operating system and acting as a peer in the cluster. Version 5.5 OneFS raises cluster capacity from 96 to 144 …

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Anonymous Coward
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Pipe Dreams

This is a silly press release, by a silly marketing department with no grasp on reality. Must be something they are smoking.

In reality, customers install no more than 10 nodes. The performance of the cluster falls off a cliff as you add more nodes than that. That negates anything else that they've published, all of which assumes linear scalability in every measure.

In reality, you can't get 12000 disk IOPS out of a 12 drive SAS or 36 drive SATA system as they are claiming. Max possible disk IOPS for those drives types would be 4800 (12 drive SAS) or 7200 (36 drive SATA), and only under ideal full sequential IOPS testing.

In reality, they aren't delivering 5.2 PB of USABLE capacity, even if we are generous and concede that they could deliver a 144 node cluster. At best, they might achieve over 4.5PB of usable capacity (if we're generous about overhead), but ONLY if they could actually manage parity across 144 nodes.

Anonymous Coward
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but if you want performance...

If you want *real* performance you get a BlueArc Titan. Everything else is just for kids.

Anonymous Coward
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Re: Pipe Dreams

Just wondering if you've ever used an Isilon cluster or are basing your figures off clustered systems in general?

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