Isilon is a scale out network-attached storage platform offered by EMC Corporation for high-volume storage, backup and archiving of unstructured data. It provides a cluster-based storage array based on industry standard hardware, and is scalable to 50 petabytes in a single filesystem using its FreeBSD-derived OneFS file system.
An Isilon clustered storage system is composed of three or more nodes. Each node is a self-contained, rack-mountable device that contains industry standard hardware, including disk drives, CPU, memory and network interfaces, and is integrated with proprietary operating system software called OneFS (based on FreeBSD), which unifies a cluster of nodes into a single shared resource.
Current Isilon hardware platforms include the S-Series nodes, which support high-performance, process-intensive, high-transaction applications; the X-Series nodes, which support high-throughput and high-concurrency application needs; the NL-Series nearline storage nodes, which support archiving, disaster recovery and disk-to-disk backup needs; and the HD-Series nodes, which support large-scale, high-density deep archive storage needs, as well as disaster recovery and, when combined with other nodes, an enterprise data lake foundation. Isilon also offers A-Series Accelerator nodes, which scale cluster performance and data backup processes.
Isilon Systems was a computer hardware and software company founded in 2001 by Sujal Patel, who received his B.S. from University of Maryland in 1996 in computer science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. It was headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It sold clustered file system hardware and software for digital content and other unstructured data to a variety of industries. Isilon Systems designed and developed its clustered storage systems specifically to address the needs of storing, managing and accessing digital content and other unstructured data.