One Petabyte in a single volume

Isilon has updated its OneFS distributed file system, and added snapshot and load balancing software. OneFS can now manage one Petabyte of capacity, Isilon claims, where the previous version topped out at 250TB.

OneFS is part of Isilon's IQ software suite for clustered storage. The new version, OneFS 4.5, allows up to 1PB of data to be managed as a single volume and a single file system.

The aim, according to Isilon, is to let enterprises bring their huge data archives online, making them as accessible as any other critical business information.

The IQ software works with Isilon's storage nodes - these are effectively disk arrays based on standard hardware, but which can be clustered together to form a single logical array. As well as the new snapshot and load balancing utilities, IQ also supports N+3 and N+4 data protection to defend against multiple simultaneous disk or node failures.

Isilon is a small operator, but it filed for an IPO last month, and clustered file systems have been a hot topic of late - they are why NetApp bought Spinnaker and EMC tied up with Ibrix, for example. ®