EMC Isilon is first for scale-out NAS with Hadoop

By combining this level of data storage with Apache-based (open source) Hadoop data-intensive distributed analytics and including services and customer support, the firm says it is enabling a step change in adoption of technology that was hitherto the domain of search giants such as Google and Yahoo. Brian Cox, senior director of product marketing at EMC Isilon, makes the point that, as unstructured data grows, companies require an efficient and scalable storage system but also even more powerful analytics to extract useful information quickly. EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with native HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system) provides Hadoop users with built-in access to exactly that, he says – a shared storage infrastructure that makes big data Hadoop accessible for mission critical business analytics. Until now, explains Cox, early adopters of Hadoop have relied on makeshift storage infrastructures not optimised for big data. That has inhibited data sharing, which is critical to robust analysis, so preventing wide adoption of Hadoop in business IT infrastructures. EMC Isilon, with native HDFS, removes the integration complexities of disparate open source components and hardware, he states, and offers an enterprise-ready storage solution to protect, manage and share data in a Hadoop environment. Alex Younts, an engineer at Purdue University, agrees. "We tested EMC Isilon with our statistics department, which must often analyse huge data sets. EMC Isilon's multi-protocol capabilities provided fast and reliable delivery of data, demonstrating the potential to increase the time spent on doing the science, while reducing management costs."