Isilon
More info
- Creator
- Sujal Patel, Paul Mikesell
- Released
- 2001
- Owner
- Dell
- Type
- Storage system
The Seattle company that built NAS clusters where you add capacity by sliding in another node and the filesystem simply grows.
Isilon was founded in 2001. Conventional NAS scales up — bigger controller, more shelves — until it hits the ceiling. Isilon's OneFS instead spread data and metadata across every node in the cluster and presented them as a single namespace over NFS and SMB. That suited broadcasters, film studios and genomics labs, where files are large and never stop multiplying.
EMC bought Isilon in 2010 for about $2.25 billion. After Dell swallowed EMC, the product was renamed PowerScale in 2020, though most of the people who run it still call it Isilon.