Q&A with Paul Rutherford, CTO of Isilon Systems

PR: Simply put, Isilon makes file-based data storage systems that enable the user to “pay as you grow,” adding performance and capacity on-demand as needs change over time. In analyst terms, Gartner refers to us as “the market leader in scale-out NAS.” This means that in contrast to traditional SAN and NAS, which require a user to add more and more disks – or scale up - behind a single “head” or server, eventually creating a performance bottleneck or a capacity imbalance, our systems scale out, with each node linearly increasing performance and capacity to create a much more flexible, cost-effective solution. Isilon’s “secret sauce” is our OneFS operating system, which we combine with the latest in industry-standard hardware – for instance, Hitachi 2TB disk drives and Cisco’s InfiniBand interconnect for intracluster communication – to create a complete storage system. From virtualization to nearline archive, media and entertainment to life sciences and on to manufacturing, we deliver our systems worldwide to help our customers focus on their business, not on managing their storage.

PR: Well, essentially scale-out NAS enables businesses to greatly increase data access across their organizations so they can extract greater value from mission-critical information, in less time, and accelerate business growth. Because scale-out NAS is very easy to manage and enables businesses to buy only what they need when they need it – then seamlessly add performance and/or capacity as needs change – it significantly reduces capital and operational costs. In short, it’s faster, more scalable, easier to use and more cost-effective than traditional SAN or NAS systems.

PR: Physical storage plays the same role in virtual environments as it does for traditional servers: as the repository of application data. The only real difference – and it’s a key difference – is that there are often many more “servers,” with a much greater diversity of workloads among them, attached to the storage in a virtual environment than you’d typically see in a non-virtualized infrastructure. Users often experience the effects of this for themselves when they first move to virtual servers, when they find that their disk usage patterns, performance metrics and oftentimes their overhead for backups and other automated process change dramatically.