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Overview

OneFS 5.5 - The Engine that Powers Isilon's Scale-out NAS Solutions

OneFS® is Isilon's fifth-generation operating system software that provides the intelligence behind all Isilon® Scale-out NAS 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. In addition to enabling industry-leading scalability of performance and capacity, OneFS combines mission-critical reliability and high availability with state-of-the-art data protection to help storage administrators do more with less.

OneFS Combines Three Traditional Storage Layers Into One

Isilon OneFS enables independent or linear scalability of performance and capacity to over 45 Gigabytes per second of throughput and more than 5.2 petabytes of capacity in a single file system. OneFS also provides a single point of management for large and rapidly growing repositories of file-based data and offers faster access to large files and inherent high availability.

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. With advanced features such as FlexProtect™, OneFS offers unsurpassed mission-critical reliability and industry-leading drive rebuild times. Failed drives can be rebuilt in less than an hour which is faster than more costly Fibre Channel disks and up to 24 times faster than other enterprise storage systems using Serial ATA (SATA).

The release of 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 software, 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.

OneFS includes several other features and benefits. FlexProtect™ introduces state-of-the-art functionality, which rebuilds failed disks in a fraction of the time, harnesses free storage space across the entire cluster to further insure against data loss, and proactively monitors and preemptively migrates data off of at-risk components. Conventional enterprise storage systems limit parity reconstruction operations to a subset of the storage system—a technique that leads to recovery bottlenecks, increases the time it takes to re-protect data and significantly increases the risk of data loss during a single component failure. Traditional RAID-5 parity protection results in data loss if multiple components fail prior to the completion of a rebuild. FlexProtect™, in contrast, automatically distributes all data and error correction information across the entire Isilon cluster and with its robust error correction techniques efficiently and reliably ensures that all data remains intact and fully accessible even in the unlikely event of simultaneous component failures.

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