State-Of-The-Art Technologies from Maxtor, Mellanox and Topspin Enable Isilon To Deliver Breakthrough Clustered Storage Products, Providing Customers with Unprecedented Scalability, Performance, Reliability and Value

SEATTLE , WA – April 4, 2005 – Isilon Systems®, the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage, today announced that it has teamed with leading technology companies including Maxtor Corporation, Mellanox and Topspin to deliver the next generation of clustered storage systems. By combining the latest generation of its award winning OneFS™ distributed file system software with InfiniBand networking technologies and SATA drives from its industry partners, Isilon is providing customers with complete enterprise-class storage systems that deliver unparalleled reliability, performance, and ease of use—all at a previously unattainable cost to acquire, manage, and maintain.

“The storage industry is undergoing a revolutionary shift from expensive, monolithic infrastructures to software-centric clustered computing architectures that leverage the cost and price/performance advantages of open industry standard hardware,” said Steve Goldman, president and CEO of Isilon Systems. “Isilon’s intelligent software combined with continued innovation on the part of leading hardware and networking companies like Maxtor, Mellanox and Topspin help enable us to deliver next generation storage systems with unprecedented scalability, performance and value for our customers, with a dramatically lower price point and IT operating costs.”

Unlike most traditional storage systems that include costly custom hardware components in complex, monolithic architectures to achieve the performance and reliability required for mission critical storage, the Isilon IQ family of modular clustered storage systems offers unmatched simplicity and ease of use. Through its innovative software and leveraging the billions of dollars of research and development and huge unit volumes of industry leading hardware suppliers, Isilon enables customers to create large clusters of these industry standard building blocks—and turn them into a unified storage system that is highly reliable, highly scalable, and that delivers much more total throughput and reliability than traditional NAS and SAN storage architectures.

Isilon’s latest Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, and 4800 storage systems also announced today (see separate press release) are the first clustered storage systems to implement low latency, high performance InfiniBand networking as a transparent interconnect within an Isilon IQ cluster—enabling significant gains in storage performance without requiring any changes to a customer’s existing IT infrastructure. Isilon’s use of Maxtor MaXLine® Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives together with Isilon’s OneFS distributed file system software provides customers with a storage solution that has the reliability and performance characteristics required for enterprise storage applications with economics that are very compelling.

“We are experiencing incredible demand for our MaXLine SATA drives for emerging enterprise applications,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing for Maxtor. “MaXLine drives are a great match for Isilon’s IQ clustered storage products because they provide the cost efficiencies required by customers and bring tremendous value to the data center.”

"As a driving force behind the InfiniBand standard and leader in InfiniBand-based silicon solutions, we are thrilled that Isilon has added InfiniBand for intracluster communication to their newest line of Isilon IQ clustered storage systems," said Eyal Waldman, CEO and chairman of Mellanox Technologies. "By working with leading edge technology partners like Isilon we are helping increase performance, reduce complexity and lower costs for high performance networked infrastructures."

“As a pioneer and the leader in InfiniBand-based networking solutions, Topspin is committed to delivering the benefits of our technology to a wide array of real-world, mission critical applications,” said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO of Topspin Communications. “We are thrilled to witness the significant performance enhancements our customers are achieving through our joint solutions with Isilon. We are impressed by Isilon’s commitment to this space, and thrilled to certify our industry leading Topspin server switches with the industry leading Isilon IQ clustered storage family of products.”

The Isilon IQ 1920 and 3000 have been deployed in the most demanding customer environments and will be generally available in April, with the Isilon IQ 4800 generally available in June. Entry prices for these systems range from one cent to 1.5 cents per megabyte with no additional cost for high-performance InfiniBand.

About Isilon Systems

Isilon is the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage systems. Isilon’s award-winning family of Isilon IQ products are high performance clustered storage systems that combine an intelligent distributed file system with modular industry standard hardware to deliver unmatched simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ systems were designed for digital content and large data-intensive markets, such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, the Federal Government, life sciences, and oil and gas. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture and Madrona Venture Group. For more information, visit: http://www.isilon.com .