* Isilon launches SmartQuota
Clustered storage vendor Isilon this week is joining the ranks of vendors that claim to do thin provisioning of storage.
Isilon Systems, which went public last year, launched SmartQuotas, storage software for its clustered storage that provides quota management and thin provisioning In its press release introducing SmartQuotas, the company cites research from Forrester that suggests storage resources are only 40% utilized. The software allows the management of unstructured data and digital content stored on Isilon’s IQ cluster.
SmartQuotas working with Isilon’s OneFS 4.7 operating system enables business to partition a single pool of storage and assign percentages of it to individual users or groups. The quotas set can then be adjusted by the IT administrator. Storage resources can be managed at the directory, sub-directory, user and group level.
SmartQuotas is available in a bundle of software that includes snapshot capabilities and the company’s load-balancing and failover SmartConnect software. The bundle costs $8,600 per Isilon IQ node.
Further, the company launched new cluster nodes – the IQ 9000 and EX 9000, which allow an Isilon IQ cluster to expand to as much as 1.6PB in a single file system and volume.
The Isilon IQ 9000 node and Isilon EX 9000 extension node each contain 12 750GB Serial ATA II disk drives, providing as much as 9TB of capacity in a 2U high form factor. The IQ 9000 provides for linear scaling of both capacity and performance; when the EX 9000 is paired with the Isilon IQ 9000, capacity can be scaled independent of performance.
The new nodes range from $2,500 to $4,000 per terabyte.
