Isilon combines standard hardware components with unified software to harness unstructured data. Powered by the distributed OneFS operating system, an EMC Isilon cluster delivers a scalable pool of storage with a global namespace. The EMC Isilon platform’s unified software provides centralized web-based and command line administration to manage the following features: Clusters that run a distributed file system Scale-out nodes that add capacity and performance Storage options that manage files, block data, and tiering Flexible data protection and high availability Software modules that control costs and optimize resources.
Isilon scale-out NAS is cluster-based. In an Isilon environment, clients connect to hardware storage units called nodes, which contain drives. Each node contains CPU and memory (4 GB minimum), and each node that you add increases cluster performance and capacity. Each node connects to all other nodes through the internal network. Because each node contains globally coherent RAM, as a cluster becomes larger, it becomes faster. The file system expands dynamically and redistributes content, which eliminates the work of partitioning disks and creating volumes.
Kanad, named after the great Hindu sage thought to have originated the idea of an atom, is an IBM iDataPlex cluster at IISER Bhopal. It is the institute's first High-Performance Computing facility serving the computational needs of several research groups on campus. The iDataPlex racks are liquid-cooled and host 132 compute nodes (2112 processor cores) representing a theoretical peak performance of 44 Teraflops/sec. Each iDataPlex node runs on Intel E5-2670 series CPUs and has at least 64 GB memory. There are 4 high-memory nodes with 192 GB RAM for memory-intensive applications. The nodes are interconnected by 4X QDR InfiniBand network. The cluster has access to 100 TB of storage divided in to a home (NFS) area of 60 TB and a parallel-file system of 40 TB as scratch. With a write through-put of over 2 GB/s this file system provides invaluable I/O speed when running applications. more
