Performance has been very good, with read performance often hovering around 480MB/s and writes in the 330MB/s range. This level of reads is very close to wire speed (4 gig-e ports active).

It’s a very unique product that for certain workloads can’t be matched. We’ve used other NAS gateway products and they can’t compete.

When price of NAS gateway, FC fabric, and storage is compared to the Isilon pricing it is competitive.

Hope this helps….

CC

If anyone has an Isilon system, can you post some benchmarking output? =) Interested in iops and bandwidth numbers.

vo- I find those performance statistics unbelievable. There is no way a single isilon node could match performance with a 3070 controller-based system, period. Not even close.

Or at least a comparison to the netapp 3070 you benchmarked it against — Compared to a netapp 3070 with DS-14 10K FC disk shelves attached, where does the price of the Isilon setup fall? (for example) +/- 20% the cost of the netapp?

iometer show performance of the Xnodes under vmware are 2-5x better than the previous nodes and are inline with the iometer numbers for a Netapp 3070. So 6 nodes will perform about the same a 6 3070’s.

Isilon can dynamically load balance NFS clients on the fly across all nodes. You can setup a cron job to move clients every 10 minutes based on bandwidth if you like. No other NFS server can do this without NFS timeouts. You can loose from 1 to 4 shelves of 12 disks without data loss which is another unique feature.

Vmware currently does not support isilons smartconnect NFS failover. So you are currently stuck creating a different datastore for each node. It’s not that bad of a problem…

Setup is a snap… you can even add nodes from the front panel.

Isilon is a very young company and it shows in their sales and technical support. The don’t have many bells and whistles and their NFS and CIFS(samba) are basic, however their price reflects the offer.

The key to Netapps success is their ontap OS which supports NAS, FC and ISCSI all in one product which is amazing… Isilon’s Onefs may turnout the be they next OS of choice for storage, however it will be several years before all the features are available.

The main benefit of Isilon: It’s a wakeup call for other NAS vendors…

Isilon is claiming improved performance. I can neither confirm nor deny this because I haven’t seen the new boxes nor have I tested them.

TimC-
vmware is extremely random, but it’s low throughput. And most of the vmware installs I’ve seen are not very high iop workloads. The performance bottleneck hierarchy in vmware usually goes- memory, cpu, disk, network. Also as far as SATA, I see a ton of customers deploying vmware on SATA (not isilon per se), but the slower individual speed of each sata drive can be overcome with proper data layout and the appropriate number of spindles. Of course disk for disk it’s slower, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a solution to support

I’m curious to hear how Isilon (the new X-series) performs in this type of workload, as this is exactly the type of workload I’ll be talking to them about on Friday afternoon.

The issue though, is that vmware is EXTREMELY random in it’s data read/writes by nature. Not really the type of transactions/workload that isilon excels at.

The issue I see even now is that isilon is still strictly SATA drives. They typically don’t hold up under high iop workloads, which is exactly what most vmware installs are.

VMware is designed similar- add esx servers and grow your resource pool- now do the same with your storage- add isilon nodes and increase your storage size and performance.

I just contacted Isilon this morning myself, so I will try to share what I learn as this progresses.