Best scale out performance with global namespace in the business
January 13, 2016
Best scale out performance with global namespace in the business
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS
Our company implemented an Isilon cluster to manage millions of black and white tif image files that our software manipulates and makes searchable for end users. We also have solved other business obstacles including a secure FTP on the Isilon cluster.
- Auto data balancing between nodes while still maintaining great performance
- Directory snapshots
- Universal namespace
- Network load balancing across nodes
- OneFS block size is somewhere around 128kb stripe unit while most of our tif image files are around 50kb so our logical vs. physical storage is far apart. This caused extra capacity to be needed. I'd like to see the minimum block size to be smaller or initially adjustable depending on user data type.
- This may just be a training issue, but it's confusing looking at "free" space available when I have a file share mapped to Windows vs. what OneFS states for available free space as they do not match.
- We noticed that after adding a new node to an existing cluster in production that we had to adjust the networking config in OneFS to allow for another dhcp address so the new node could get an IP address. Normally this wouldn't matter, but it did have a nasty side effect where the SMB service failed after changing the network config which caused a system wide outage since we mostly use SMB protocol. Once the SMB service was restarted via ssh, we were back in business and it was working again.
- The global namespace feature has reduced complexity significantly and made projects turn around faster.
- Conversion of data is 10 times faster and less complex.
- Initial customer installations are significantly faster.
- Management of data is significantly easier.
- overland, SnapServer and SnapScale
Raw disk space vs. logical disk space ratio was significantly better on the Isilon. Fast cache using SSD drives for faster searching is available on the Isilon but not available on the Overland solution. Isilon solution included faster backend switching between nodes.