4 New Dell EMC Isilon Products For Kubernetes And Microsoft Azure

Dell Technologies launches four new products for its Isilon storage portfolio including a new version of Isilon OneFS, a container storage plugin and new Azure ExpressRoute Local compatibility.

Dell EMC Enhances Isilon Storage Portfolio

Dell Technologies is boosting its Dell EMC Isilon portfolio by adding a slew of capabilities including a new container storage plugin and faster access to Microsoft Azure’s public cloud.

The overall goal of the new offerings is to enable partners and customers to gain better insights and solve business outcomes from their data and help manage their data growth, according to Erin Banks, director of product marketing for Dell EMC’s Unstructured Data Solutions group.

“As we have entered this data decade, data is proving to become an organization’s most valuable asset,” said Banks. “IT leaders need to take a data-first approach to ensure data is secured, protected, available where and when it is needed, delivered at the performance levels required by an organization’s applications, and stored and managed within compliance policies. Having the right tools that can detect problems and automatically provide insights about your data center will be increasingly beneficial to mitigating the risk of data unavailability – or even worse – data loss.”

Here are four new Dell EMC Isilon products launched this week aimed at helping businesses leverage their data and storage environment more effectively.

Container Storage Interface Plugin For Isilon (Free In Some Cases)

Dell EMC Isilon has now become Kubernetes ready.

The company launched the Container Storage Interface Plugin for Isilon which provides customers scale out NAS features to containerized workloads. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) Plugin allows developers to build and deploy microservices on a Kubernetes cluster with Isilon as the file storage platform.

With the CSI Plugin for Isilon, customers gain scalable persistent storage for containerized workloads with operations including volume provisioning and deletion, snapshot creation and deletion, creating volumes from snapshots and shared storage access for NFS file shares across multiple Pods.

Dell channel partners can get the CSI plugin free of charge on GitHub, Docker Hub and the Dell EMC Community forums for CSI Drivers and Containers.

Faster Microsoft Azure Access, Eliminating Egress Charges

Cloud Storage Services with Microsoft Azure has been enhanced to deliver a higher bandwidth, up to 200 Gbps, and lower latency connection from Isilon to the Azure cloud using Azure ExpressRoute Local. Microsoft’s ExpressRoute Local is a fast link to a nearby Azure cloud data center.

Additionally, there are no outbound data traffic costs for data written to Isilon from Azure.

Dell EMC’s Cloud Storage Services connects external storage, consumed as-a-service, directly to the public cloud. The goal is to enable organizations to combine the benefits of compute and processing services in the cloud with the scalability and performance of Isilon, while at the same time maintaining control and security to their data.

Faction CEO Sean Charnock said the offering is a unique enterprise solution “that reduces the complexity and time required to replicate and present large, petabyte-scale datasets directly into Azure and eliminates the high cost of outbound egress fees” associated with writing data to environments outside of the public cloud.

Dell said eliminating egress charges enables workloads that require “a lot of temporary writes to Isilon” to cost-effectively take advantage of Azure’s application services. The solution allows businesses to choose the right combination of compute and storage for demanding, high I/O throughput file-based workloads that require high compute performance which is suitable for a cloud consumption model.

Isilon OneFS 8.2.2

Dell EMC released its latest OneFS operating system with OneFS version 8.2.2. Dell’s storage solutions are powered by its OneFS operating system that enable customers to consolidate data, drive new workloads and leverage business values from unstructured datasets.

The new OneFS 8.2.2. supports 16 TB file sizes designed for larger files workloads such as automated driver assist solutions, oil and gas exploration, drone telemetry and electronic design automation-based solutions, according to Dell.

OneFS can now delivers up to three-times greater effective capacity and support for four-time larger file sizes. Inline compression and deduplication deliver up to three-times greater effective capacity on the high-performance Dell EMC Isilon H5600 platform enabling customers to reduce data center footprint and optimize storage services, according to Dell.

CloudIQ Support For Isilon

CloudIQ is Dell’s free cloud-based application that uses machine learning to provide insights, monitoring and analytics about a customer’s storage environment. This free array performance analysis service now supports Dell EMC’s Isilon systems.

Partners can now leverage CloudIQ to gain summaries of the health of data centers, streamline administrative tasks and help alleviate bottlenecks. The application allows partners to report, predict and proactively address issues before they impact business.

By 2024, enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object from what they have in 2019, according to IT research firm Gartner. As data grows at an unprecedented pace, it is being processed in new ways and becoming more distributed across data centers and clouds.

Isilon customers can monitor their data center through CloudIQ’s single interface and can access it from any web browser or the CloudIQ mobile app.