At Thanksgiving last week, I couldn’t help but feel cheesy as I thought about all the things I was thankful for. One of the many items on my list was what we’ve been able to achieve here at Isilon this year. Two weeks ago we reached a very important internal milestone of making OneFS 7.0 available on the market.

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It’s big. It’s awesome.

Mavericks. OneFS 7.0.

I couldn’t be more excited to write about a release that has been near and dear to my heart for the last year and a half. Immediately following the acquisition of Isilon by EMC, we embarked on a tremendous effort to bring Scale-Out NAS to the mainstream Enterprise customer while simultaneously improving the lives of our existing customers.

Our primary strategy is to invest in high growth areas where Scale-Out NAS can make a tremendous difference to business and the lives of the individuals. These include, but are not limited to, areas such as Home Directories/File Shares, Technical Computing Applications, and Online Archives – all at scale. We see a broad desire for scale in these workloads across the Enterprise and Commercial segments, as well from a Line of Business and Vertical Market perspective.

With Mavericks we focused on four key areas: Security, Data Performance, Data Protection, and Interoperability. Let’s ride the Mavericks’ wave together:

Security

OneFS is built on a strong foundation of Enterprise security. In OneFS 7.0, Isilon extends the simplicity and scalability of Scale-Out NAS into two key environments – private cloud and compliance. In OneFS 7.0, we are introducing new security capabilities:

• Authentication Zones, to allow departments that require separation to co-exist in the same storage
• Roles-based administration, which protects from security breaches to the infrastructure
• An extended SmartLock application which delivers SEC 17a-4 compliant storage

Data Protection

OneFS was designed from the ground up to have a scalable data protection model. Rather than being designed around traditional RAID technologies, OneFS protects data rather than devices – and protects that data across multiple nodes. With OneFS 7.0, we’ve introduced new data protection capabilities in the existing SnapshotIQ, SyncIQ, and SmartPools technologies, which make Scale-Out applicable for a wider range of critical information. The degree to which information can be efficiently protected has never been more simple or scalable.

Performance

OneFS is a next-generation scale-out storage architecture that enables customers to scale capacity and performance together.

In OneFS 7.0 we’ve improved concurrent access to individual files, which both improves the I/O rate of non-sequential applications, but also doubles single-stream sequential applications. The 7.0 release extends the applicability of OneFS into non-sequential and smaller block I/O workflows. In short, OneFS 7.0 makes scale-out applicable for a much wider set of performance-sensitive applications.

Interoperability

OneFS supports all industry-standard protocols: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP and FTP. Earlier in 2012, Isilon led the storage industry by announcing native support for the Hadoop file protocol, HDFS.

In this release, we are providing specific integration with VMware through the VAAI and VASA APIs. These APIs, in combination with per-file cloning technologies and lower latency, significantly improve the virtualization experience on OneFS.

So all in all, scale-out has never been more accessible to Enterprise IT than it is today with OneFS 7.0. The set of applications, workloads, and use cases where scale-out technology dramatically improves performance, simplifies management, and increase efficiency have never been greater. The tipping point has been reached; with OneFS 7.0, EMC Isilon is the first enterprise storage vendor to bring scale-out into the heart of the data center.