<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">With all the news releases at EMC World around Isilon with virtualization and the cloud, I thought it would be a good time to bring this article back up. Isilon is continuing to add more integration with VMware into its offering, with the recent past additions of integration and support of VMware's Site Recovery Manager and integration of Isilon into the vCenter client itself, Isilon has been making steady progress. However, with OneFS 6.5 they are now integrating VASA and VAAI supportability as well strengthening Isilon even further with customers who are running NFS for their VMware environment. So all that being said let’s take a look at why Isilon is a great fit for use in your VMware environment.</span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small"><a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/before-and-after.jpg"><img class="aligncenter  wp-image-6668" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/before-and-after.jpg" alt="" width="670" height="326" /></a></span>

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<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">Server virtualization streamlines and maximizes your server resources. However, you must have a scalable storage platform to fully realize the economic benefits, flexibility and agility virtualization can provide. </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">The Isilon IQ storage platform, powered by the OneFS® operating system, was designed from the ground up to reduce storage complexity. In a dynamic virtualized environment, Isilon Scale-out NAS eliminates the management complexity inherent in traditional SAN or scale-up NAS storage while increasing application availability and protection. With Isilon you can: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">1. <strong>Simplify</strong> storage management: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">Consolidate and replace tens, hundreds, or thousands of volumes with a single namespace, single volume, and single file system to host thousands of virtual machines. With Isilon you can also consolidate virtualized and non-virtualized application storage with standard networking and file sharing protocols. </span>

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<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">2. Quickly <strong>adapt</strong> to change: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">In a dynamic environment where VMs are added daily, with Isilon you can non-disruptively scale storage and performance. When a storage node is added to an Isilon cluster the additional capacity, performance and connectivity is immediately available and shared across all virtualized data stores. </span>

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<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">3. Increase <strong>efficiency</strong> and <strong>productivity</strong>: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">Achieve over 80% storage utilization without degrading performance. Our globally coherent cache and Isilon SmartConnect client load-balancing provide high-performance with rock-solid data protection, high availability and system resiliency. Eliminate complex storage management tasks, such as chasing hot-spots and migrating VMs across traditional SAN or scale-up NAS and focus on achieving the greatest gains from your virtualized server environment. </span>

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<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">4. Increase <strong>protection</strong> and disaster <strong>recovery</strong> in your virtualized environment: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">Isilon provides a suite of integrated software applications for every level of your virtual environment to protect applications and data. With Isilon, you can non-disruptively set different protection policies, unlimited snapshot and replication schedules at the individual VM level, or across any number of data stores. </span>

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<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">5. Economic <strong>value</strong>: </span>

<span style="font-family: Calibri;font-size: small">More than 1,000 Isilon customers have experienced significant savings and increased agility in their storage environment. With an intuitive, easy to use, single file system, you can reduce time spent on storage management—from days and weeks to minutes</span>

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