Disclaimer: I recently attended Dell EMC World 2017.  My flights, accommodation and conference pass were paid for by Dell EMC via the Dell EMC Elect program. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Here are my rough notes from the #storage.58 session. This was presented by John Har and covered the H and A series Isilon hardware.

Isilon Overview

Isilon: the true scale out NAS

Has been around for 15 years

• Single scalable namespace
• 18TB to 65PB, 1GB/s to 140GB/s
• Distributed filesystem across cluster, up to 144 nodes
• No bottlenecks, no hotspots
• Easy to manage, no RAID, LUNs or multiple FS to manage
• Up to 89% storage efficiency

Transparent, optimised storage tiering

• Reduce capital expense
• Optimise storage
• Transparent to users and applications
• Flexible admin defined policies
• Deduplication

Cloud tiering to ECS, Azure, AWS, virtustream, etc

Enterprise Grade Data Protection and Management

• SnapshotIQ – Fast, efficient data backup and recovery
• SyncIQ – Fast and flexible asynchronous replication for disaster recovery protection
• SmartConnect – Policy-based client failover with load balancing
• SmartLock – Policy-based compliance and WORM data protection
• SmartDedupe – Data deduplication to reduce storage requirements and costs
• SmartPools – Policy-based automated tiering
• SmartQuotas – Quota management and thin provisioning
• InsightIQ – Performance monitoring and reporting to manage storage resources
• CloudPools – Seamlessly tier cold or frozen data to a choice of public or private cloud options
• Access Zones – Secure separation of data for different groups or users

New generation architecture

• Drive sleds future-proofed to support other drives such as NVMe
• Compute “suitcases” – performance / cost optimised
• Use either with IB or Ethernet (one or the other) – Isilon still owns / qualifies the back-end networking
• Non-disruptive migration will be possible too (from InfiniBand to Ethernet)

Streaming image/video workflows Everywhere

Typical requirements

• >1GB/s sequential read/write
• GB-TB sized datasets
• Low, stable latency <2ms

Example: M&E 4K uncompressed workflows

• Post-production and visual effects flow
• 5-100 artists & editors, 5K – 10K core render farm
• 1.2GB/s per 4K uncompressed stream (73GB/min)
• Sometimes cache on clients – data management headache

Solution: Work directly off Isilon

• H600 and F800 optimised for many 1-2GB/s streams
• Can edit and create effects directly off of H600
• Eliminate dedicated edit storage and data movements
• Seamless tiering with archive in same cluster – transparent to clients

Why not just use ECS for archive? ECS is great for geo-distributed, PB scale. Isilon ideal for the same site.

High IOPS Workloads

IOPS-intensive design, distribution, and search

Typical requirements

• Millions of small temporary files
• Heavy on creates and deletes
• Metadata intensive

Example: EDA Design

Intensive, multi-staged chip design process

• Thousands of files created (checkout)
• Millions of temp files created
• Simulation and verification testing
• Millions of files deleted

10s to 100s of concurrent projects

Solution: Performance and density with Generation 6

• F800 or H600 can simplify the performance tier for active design projects
• H500 / H400 / A200 can be recent projects or DR site
• A200 / A2000 can provide TBs to PBs of deep archive

Archive – You never know when you’ll need that again

Typical requirements

• 10s – 100s of PB
• Online and few seconds of latency
• Moderate read throughput when data needed

Example: Population-scale genomics

• Per million people – 80PB of whole genome data
• “Variant calling” to extract population-scale insights using traditional HPC or newer Hadoop methods
• Need performant, deep archives

Solution: Generation 6

H-series for single namespace of active processing

• H600 for continuous ingest, transfers, intense HPC
• H500/H400 for researchers

A2000 for deep archives in same namespace or separate site. Continue to tier further down to ECS for geo-collaboration

Closing Thoughts

• H-series and A-series are future-proofed in performance and capacity to grow your business
• Isilon Generation 6 delivers the optimal mix of performance, capacity and densities for every part of your workflows, new and existing
• Existing Isilon benefits continue: single namespace, scalability and simplicity
• Seamless data lake to Dell EMC ECS and public cloud for colder archives
• Looking at how to replace the backup accelerators (A100)

Very useful session. 4.5 stars.