On 19 October, Dell EMC made an announcement about the All-Flash Isilon nodes. This product line has been code-named “Project Nitro”. The announcement was timed to occur during the first-ever Dell EMC World event.
I’ll walk through what was announced, and then provide additional details.
On Monday at EMC World, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ed Beauvais, EMC’s Director of Isilon Product Marketing. Ed was gracious enough to agree to be interviews for the MiniCast. We talked about new features in Isilon OneFS 8.0 and how they fit into EMC’s “Edge to Core to Cloud” message.
At one point in the interview, it appears that Ed and I confused each other about CloudPools functionality. Ed and I chatted about that after the 15-minute time limit and cleared it up pretty quickly. Turns out we were talking about two similar but different things.
Ed was saying that CloudPools does not, at this time, allow you to use an IsilonSD Edge virtual instance running in the Cloud as your remote tier. I neither confirm or deny whether or not that functionality is on the Isilon roadmap. (No, seriously, I can’t. Sometimes I use that phrase to be cute and let folks know that I know something I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but in this case I can’t tell you anything because I really don’t know. Ed gave me nothing on this one at all…)
What I was talking about was using a physical Isilon cluster at another site as your remote CloudPools tier. That is supported, and can be done today.
With that clarification in mind, take a listen to Ed and I talking Isilon.
You may remember that back in November EMC announced new features coming to Isilon. Most of the message focused on the IsilonSD Edge virtual appliance, but a lot of the rest had to do with “OneFS.NEXT” (which we all expected to be numbered 8.0).
About 3 weeks ago, OneFS 8.0 became GA. The availability of the new software happened with very little announcement and absolutely no fanfare. I found this somewhat surprising given how much EMC had hyped up the pre-announcement so far in advance.
With the availability of 8.0, two other new things become available: the new CloudPools software and IsilonSD Edge. This post covers everything that’s new. Continue reading
[NOTE: This post has been updated with answers to some of the questions I had at the time of the announcement. The updates are inline, below.]
Today, EMC made some announcements about some new Isilon products that they hope to make Generally Available (GA) in “early 2016”. If you’ve been following Isilon closely like I do, nothing in the announcements will be a big surprise as everything talked about is something the Isilon folks have been talking about in roadmap presentations for a while now.
After presenting more marketing about the Data Lake message (I’ll summarize: Put all your data in one big place. That place is Isilon. That Isilon Data Lake can now (OK, in “early 2016”) be expanded from the Core to the Edge and even to the Cloud”), the announcement covers plans to announce:
I’ll go through each of these, plus more, in some detail below. Continue reading
Yesterday, EMC announced the addition of a new node type to their Isilon scale-out storage line. This new node offers higher-density storage than any other Isilon nodes, specifically 354TB raw capacity in 4U of rack space.
The new node, known internally at EMC as “Colossus”, has been launched as the HD400. I’ll walk through the details below. Continue reading
Today, in their largest announcement since EMC, Cisco, and VMware jointly announced the company’s formation five years ago, VCE announced seven new additions to their product lineup. These new additions consist of:
I’ll walk through each of these in more detail below. Continue reading
Perhaps you remember EMC’s first big product announcement event under their then-new CMO Jeremy Burton. They called it a “MegaLaunch” and set out to break several world records as part of the event. If you remember 20 people stuffed into a Mini Cooper, you remember the event.
Every year since then, EMC has repeated the MegaLaunch theme. Last year I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat at MegaLaunch III in Milan.
This year it’s MegaLaunch IV and here are what I think the important bits are:
Which was your favorite part of the MegaLaunch event? Let me know in the comments below.
Today, as part of their “MegaLaunch”, EMC announced updates to the Isilon scale-out NAS platform. The updates include two new hardware nodes, expanded Flash capabilities, and new data access methods.
I’ll walk through the updates below. Continue reading
[Instructions found herein are based upon the work of multiple other folks in this thread in the Isilon Support Forum.]
By now, you’re likely aware of the “Heartbleed” security vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptography library. If you have an Isilon cluster, you might be wondering if it’s affected. The good news is that all versions of OneFS are Heartbleed-free.
However, if you’re also running the InsightIQ monitoring software, it might be vulnerable, depending on the version. Here’s what you need to know to find out if your cluster is affected — and what to do about it if it is. Continue reading
[NOTE: I did not develop this process. I’ve simply expanded on instructions I originally received in email from my colleague, Andrew Boggs. Thanks to Andrew for the tip.]
If you’re like me, you have a company-issued Windows laptop. If you, further like me, sometimes need to connect to the console of Isilon nodes, this “How To” is for you. Continue reading
