Despite being written off for dead . . .
Isilon’s been putting their IPO money to good use: engineering the next gen of their platform that they’ve named the X-series. In the meantime they’ve been adding customers – over 600 so far – and they have 60 customers running the new kit.

Moving from an aging single-core Xeon to a dual-core Xeon – the second core isn’t turned on yet – with faster busses and more cache speeds things up. They claim up to 60% faster performance, 20% less power and heat and 10 GigE readiness. Once they get their software dual-core aware they’ll have another nice boost to offer.

The StorageMojo take
Turning over the platform more rapidly than traditional array vendors do is a good strategy. It keeps the competition off-balance and gives you something new to tell customers. What good is commodity hardware if you don’t follow Moore’s law?

That said, Isilon’s scale out architecture is the real differentiator vs NetApp and other traditional filers. More bang for the buck just underscores the differences.

Comments welcome.