Home Enterprise Dell EMC Enhances Isilon Adding Kubernetes Support

Dell EMC Enhances Isilon Adding Kubernetes Support

by Adam Armstrong

Today Dell EMC announced new platform enhancements for its Dell EMC Isilon and new capabilities for Dell EMC Isilon OneFS. These new enhancements include using CloudIQ to monitor for issues across Dell EMC storage environments. Isilon will support Kubernetes through a CSI. With OneFS, users will be able to scale-out to cloud in Microsoft Azure with Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services. Isilon OneFS can now reduce storage footprint by delivering up to 3x greater effective capacity and support for 4x larger file sizes.


Today Dell EMC announced new platform enhancements for its Dell EMC Isilon and new capabilities for Dell EMC Isilon OneFS. These new enhancements include using CloudIQ to monitor for issues across Dell EMC storage environments. Isilon will support Kubernetes through a CSI. With OneFS, users will be able to scale-out to cloud in Microsoft Azure with Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services. Isilon OneFS can now reduce storage footprint by delivering up to 3x greater effective capacity and support for 4x larger file sizes.

Data, particularly unstructured data, is growing with no end in sight. According to Gartner, by 2024 enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage from what they have in 2019. Not only is data growing and being seen as more valuable, it is being stored, processed, and distributed in new and complicated ways. The capabilities announced today by Dell EMC are aimed at giving customers a better handle on their data through its lifecycle. 

CloudIQ is a free, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) solution that allows customers to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot Dell EMC’s storage systems. CloudIQ now supports Isilon extending the same benefits to this platform. Support now ranges across all of Dell EMC’s portfolio including Isilon, PowerMax, Dell EMC Unity XT, XtremIO, SC Series, PowerVault, and Connectrix switches. Customers can monitor any and all of the above systems through a web browser or the mobile app.

Dell EMC has introduced the Container Storage Interface (CSI) Plugin for Isilon. According to the company, with the CSI Plugin for Isilon, customers gain scalable persistent storage for containerized workloads with operations including volume provisioning/deletion, snapshot creation/deletion, creating volumes from snapshots and shared storage access for NFS file shares across multiple Pods. The CSI is said to give customers an easy and cost-effective method for deploying Kubernetes and is available for free.

For those that need lots of compute for a certain workload, Dell EMC now allows users to leverage Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services to extend into public clouds such as Microsoft Azure to process those workloads. Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services with Azure can deliver up to 200Gbps at a latency as less than 1.2ms from Isilon to the cloud through Azure ExpressRoute Local. This is done without the outbound data traffic costs for data written to Isilon from within Azure.

Storage needs grow along with the increase in data; to this end, Dell EMC has released Isilon OneFS 8.2.2 that now supports up to 16TB file sizes. This new file size support is ideal for larger files such as drone telemetry, automated driver assist solutions, oil and gas exploration and electronic design automation-based solutions. To make the process of offering these file sizes more efficient, Isilon has inline deduplication and compression that Dell EMC claims will deliver up to 3x greater effective capacity on the high capacity.

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