رونمایی از استوریج EMC Isilon All-Flash Nitro
LAS VEGAS — EMC dropped a surprise at EMC World today by previewing an all-flash version of its Isilon clustered NAS system.
C.J. Desai, president of EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division, said “Project Nitro,” has been in the works for 18 months and is scheduled to go into beta in the second half of 2016 and begin shipping GA next year. Desai said the system will scale to 400 nodes, 100 PB of capacity and 1.5 TB per second of throughput. He described it as a “super super dense” system packed with 15 TB solid state drives.
EMC currently has four all-flash storage systems with the launch of the midrange Unity array this week. Unity joins VMAX All Flash, XtremIO and the DSSD D5 massive shared storage system in EMC’s portfolio. Isilon will be the last of the vendor’s primary storage systems to go all-flash.
Nitro looms as a competitor to Pure Storage’s FlashBlade array for unstructured data, which was announced in March and is due to ship later this year.
Large tech conferences are typically a regimented affair, and press are usually sent news releases prior to the event to further our coverage, but occasionally something pops up that is totally unannounced.
During the closing moments of the third and final day of keynotes at EMC World 2016 (never miss a keynote), EMC revealed its Isilon Nitro, an all-flash scale-out NAS appliance. Details are somewhat slight on the newest scale-out NAS in the EMC lineup, but the company did have a prototype on the show floor. Unfortunately, the rear of the rack was locked, and the bezel reveals little of the architectural design that lurks beneath.
EMC indicated that it is on the forefront of SSD and NVMe adoption with the new platform, which suggests that NVMe SSDs will be inside the Nitro. EMC redesigned the OneFS stack for all-flash, which provides a 10x improvement relative to the HDD-centric OneFS, which resides in the 5-10 ms range. EMC indicated that each node features 8 x 40 GbE interfaces for the front-end, and an additional 8 x 40 GbE back-end interfaces, which provides up to 15 GB/s of throughput and 250,000 IOPS per node.
Nitro scales up to 400 appliances, which provide a top speed of 1.5 TB/s of throughput and up to 100PB of storage in a 400-node deployment. EMC indicated that the appliance would offer 50 times the bandwidth and capacity at 50 percent of the cost (per-TB) of competing solutions, which is likely in reference to the Pure Storage FlashBlade.
The all-flash Isilon Nitro also brings tremendous density to bear. Each 4U node supports up to 200TB of flash with 3.2TB Samsung 3D NAND SSDs, and will top out at 900TB per node with 15TB SSDs. Assuming that EMC is referring to the raw (before data reduction) storage, these numbers indicate that each 4U chassis holds 60 SSDs. This will boost the maximum capacity of a 400-node deployment to 360PB.
EMC is already employing the 3.2TB SSDs in its new Unity appliances, and EMC indicated that it will move to the 15TB SSDs by the end of the year. We assume a similar trajectory for 15TB SSD adoption with the Isilon Nitro.
EMC’s Project Nitro team has been working on the project for 18 months, and indicated that Nitro features a new bladed architecture.
EMC designed the Isilon Nitro for high-performance NAS workloads, such as Media/GCI, HPC, analytics and EDA workloads. Nitro features a broad spate of file protocol support, such as SMB 3.x, NFS v3/v4, HDFS and object interfaces. EMC also includes all of the normal features found in traditional Isilon appliances, such as snapshots, SyncIQ and Cloud Pools, among others.
EMC declared 2016 as the “Year of All-Flash” earlier this yearduring the DSSD D5 launch, and the Isilon Nitro snaps yet another piece of the all-flash puzzle into place. EMC now has the DSSD D5, All-Flash VMAX, XtremIO, Unity and Isilon Nitro in a well-rounded arsenal of tools for its customers, leaving us to wonder what EMC will “flashify” next.
Isilon Nitro will enter beta later this year, and general availability is slated for 2017.