EMC will continue extending its Isilon OneFS network-attached storage operating system to new use cases later this year, adding deduplication, compliance auditing and object storage features.
Last year's Version 7.0 of the scale-out NAS operating system added the ability to store enterprise data types in addition to audio, video and images. The next version, which hasn't yet been named, will let enterprises and service providers use an Isilon NAS for both of those data types as well as for object storage, used in many new Web-oriented applications.
In its next OneFS, EMC will beef up the enterprise capabilities of the operating system. New features will include data deduplication for more efficient storage, said Sam Grocott, vice president of product management for the EMC Isilon business unit. He spoke from the EMC World conference taking place this week in Las Vegas, where the company announced a variety of new offerings and product enhancements. The deduplication feature will be able to reduce the storage needed for a given set of files by as much as 30 percent, Grocott said.
EMC also plans features that will let enterprises better ensure compliance with regulations on who can see what information. The next version of OneFS will include support for EMC's CEE (Common Event Enabler), which will let the system take advantage of auditing applications that monitor access to regulated file types. This capability will be especially useful to customers in financial services and health care, Grocott said.
The next version of OneFS will also take the Isilon NAS platform beyond files to include object storage. It will offer three ways to accommodate object storage: through a native interface called REST Object Access to Namespace, directly through the OpenStack Swift object protocol, and through ViPR, a software-defined storage platform that EMC announced on Monday. With ViPR, OneFS will be able to take advantage of Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, OpenStack Swift and other object storage interfaces, Grocott said.
OneFS already works with the Hadoop HDFS 1.0 file system for big-data analysis. The next version will add support for Hadoop 2.0. It will also allow EMC's Syncplicity file management and synchronization software to access Isilon OneFS scale-out NAS systems.
The upgraded software is expected to ship later this year. The REST Object Access to Namespace, HDFS 2.0 and Syncplicity support are available immediately and will also be included with the upcoming release.
