Powering the Isilon Scale-out Storage Platform

OneFS® is Isilon's sixth-generation operating system that provides the intelligence behind all Isilon® scale-out storage systems. It combines the three layers of traditional storage architectures—file system, volume manager and RAID—into one unified software layer, creating a single intelligent file system that spans all nodes within a cluster.

Isilon's OneFS enables:

• independent or linear scalability of performance and capacity to over 45 Gigabytes per second of throughput and more than 10.4 petabytes of capacity in a single file system
• a single point of management for large and rapidly growing repositories of data
• mission-critical reliability and high availability with state-of-the-art data protection

Unlike simple NAS namespace aggregation products, Isilon's OneFS operating system is truly distributed and intelligently stripes data across all nodes in a cluster to create a single, shared pool of storage. OneFS offers unsurpassed mission-critical reliability and industry-leading drive rebuild times.

OneFS also delivers unique cluster-aware symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities that enable the system to move tasks between processors for extremely efficient workload balancing. In conjunction with OneFS’ ability to stripe data across all nodes in a cluster, Isilon achieves the high aggregate bandwidth and transactional performance required to power next generation enterprise data centers.

How OneFS Works

Traditional file systems use a centralized server to manage a disk array, creating dependencies and points of failure within a storage system. With the OneFS operating system, each node in an Isilon clustered storage system is a peer, so any node can handle a request. Using InfiniBand® for intracluster communication and synchronization, OneFS provides each node with knowledge of the entire file system layout and where each file and part thereof is located.

Other storage systems send data through RAID and volume management layers, introducing inefficiencies in data layout. Isilon's OneFS instead controls the placement of files directly on individual disks and dramatically improves the performance of the disk sub-system by optimally distributing files across the cluster. By laying out data on disks in a file-by-file manner, OneFS is able to control the redundancy level of the storage system at the volume, directory, and even file levels.