Fresh of the presses from EMC World, Isilon has announced its latest series of X and NL nodes shipping soon to a loading dock near you! For those of you new to the Isilon wheelhouse, the X-Series nodes are your mid-tier nodes, granting the flexibility most companies need between performance and capacity.  They are highly versatile and perfect for high throughput and high concurrency applications. On the flip side the NL-Series nodes are extremely high capacity and super cost effective better serving as an archival target or even as a DR target for replication. So what’s special about the new nodes, follow me after the bump and find out.<!--more-->

Now the newest and most powerful of member of the Isilon X-Series product line, the Isilon X400 provides the perfect combination of performance and storage capacity available for a scale-out NAS storage solution from EMC. The new node is now a 3U box, a deviation from the X200 which is 2U, and has the capabilities to support a cluster of 144 nodes scaling out to a total of 15.5 PB of data. How is that for big data?! That being said one of the newest benefits of these nodes is its massive scalability in a single cluster. Isilon continues its trend with unmatched efficiency on both the NL and X-Series nodes guaranteeing 80 percent or better storage utilization even at its highest scale, not to mention giving you the ability to have up to 27 TB, yes terabytes, of globally coherent cache. This added to the ease of management coming from the OneFS environment makes this thing a powerhouse.  The X400 is perfect for all types of workloads ranging from VMware, storing PACS imaging data in healthcare, digital media, to even handling business analytics such as heavy Hadoop workflows.

Switching gears the NL400 nodes combine Big Data storage capacity with a highly economical price per terabyte of capacity and the lowest overall TCO of any scale-out storage solution available. The NL-Series is perfect for Nearline Archiving, Disaster Recovery, or as a disk-to-disk backup solution. These nodes offer very strong performance at a value price, offering a variety of options of 36, 72, or 108TB per node, yes you read that right, that’s PER NODE and under the hood we have the CPU’s to handle your advanced operation needs. Isilon also offers the 80 percent guarantee on these nodes as well.

With these new nodes being added to Isilon’s wheelhouse, EMC is proving that it is looking to continue to look to the future of Big Data with its Scale-Out architecture, offering the ability to add storage and performance as you grow. The newest hardware coupled with the impending release of Mavericks (OneFS 7.0) shows Isilon is continuing to come out guns blazing against its competitors.