Delivers Record 6 Gigabytes per Second of Total Aggregate Throughput From a Single File System, Shattering Storage Industry Performance Barriers

Ushers in Storage Industry’s First Dynamic Performance Acceleration (DPA) Software, Enabling Customers to Automatically Accelerate Performance with Zero Downtime

SEATTLE, WA — NOVEMBER 14, 2005 — Isilon® Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced at Supercomputing 2005, the introduction of the Isilon IQ Accelerator, a dynamic expansion of its award-winning product line of Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 4800 and 6000 clustered storage systems. Isilon’s IQ Accelerator brings to market the storage industry’s first performance acceleration product, which can scale to provide an industry record 6 gigabytes per second of total aggregate throughput from a single file system. With the new Isilon IQ Accelerator, customers can more than double the performance of their data storage, significantly accelerating productivity and collaboration across the digital workflow while achieving unmatched price-performance in the storage industry. The Isilon IQ Accelerator, coupled with Isilon’s OneFS™ distributed file system, ushers in next-generation Dynamic Performance Acceleration (DPA) software which automatically turbo-charges data storage performance on the fly in 15 seconds, with no manual provisioning or system downtime. “The data storage landscape is undergoing a revolutionary change. The legacy architectures of traditional storage providers were not designed to address unstructured data, the fastest growing class of data across enterprises, universities and governments, which is saddling organizations with heavy costs and untold losses in productivity,” said Sujal Patel, co-founder and CTO, Isilon Systems. “With the introduction of the Isilon IQ Accelerator, Isilon continues to define this new generation of clustered storage and places the transformative business benefits of these new systems into the customers’ hands, providing companies with the ability to truly maximize the price-performance of their data storage solutions.”

“The Isilon IQ Accelerator is yet another strong proof point of how Isilon’s next-generation architecture eclipses traditional solutions,” said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Because Isilon IQ is a single logical system regardless of how many controller nodes you put into its cluster, you can seamlessly add bandwidth, processors and cache memory for near-linear performance growth. You just can't do that with other storage systems.”

The introduction of the Isilon IQ Accelerator marks another important advance of the clustered storage innovation frontier while also delivering key business benefits which are transforming enterprise data storage. The key performance, productivity and economic benefits of the Isilon IQ Accelerator are:

Industry Leading Price-Performance—In contrast to traditional storage systems which require customers to add expensive file server heads or separately managed devices to increase performance, Isilon IQ Accelerator delivers unmatched performance at one-third of the cost of traditional storage systems. By adding the Isilon IQ Accelerator to an existing Isilon IQ clustered storage system, customers can turbo-charge their data storage and achieve previously unattainable efficiency across their network at maximum price-performance. The Isilon IQ Accelerator — which is powered by Isilon’s OneFS distributed file system software in combination with enterprise-class, industry-standard hardware — provides a first of its kind, 1U form factor appliance that delivers unmatched data storage performance, while requiring only half of the rack space and a third of the power supply of traditional storage systems.

Dynamic Performance Acceleration (DPA)—The Isilon IQ Accelerator, coupled with Isilon’s OneFS distributed file system software, ushers in the storage industry’s first DPA software, enabling customers to turbo-charge their data storage performance on the fly, with no down-time or network interruption. With DPA, the Isilon IQ Accelerator can auto-join an existing cluster in under 15 seconds, scaling storage performance in the fastest time possible in the industry. Additionally, Isilon’s unique DPA software eliminates the burdensome manual tasks required when trying to scale performance with all traditional NAS and SAN network storage systems, eliminating complexity, cost, and the risk of downtime from human error.

Increased Reliability and Data Protection—The Isilon IQ Accelerator enhances Isilon’s industry-leading reliability by utilizing the Isilon IQ Accelerator’s additional CPU, memory and bandwidth to shorten disk and node rebuild times, dramatically reducing data backup and restore windows, as well as accelerating SyncIQ data replication.

Isilon IQ Accelerator is currently in testing and will be generally available in Q1 2006. Isilon IQ Accelerator nodes can be seamlessly added to Isilon’s full product line — the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 4800 and 6000 — which are powered by the latest version of Isilon's award-winning OneFS™ distributed file system software and use high-speed, low-latency InfiniBand for intracluster communication.

About Isilon Systems

Isilon is the leader in clustered storage. Isilon's award-winning family of Isilon IQ products consists of 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 was designed for unstructured data and for use in data-intensive markets such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and government. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture, Madrona Venture Group and Focus Ventures. For more information, please visit: http://www.isilon.com