Dell EMC unveils Isilon scale-out NAS in the Google cloud

Dell EMC has announced it is working with Google to develop Isilon scale-out NAS storage in the cloud. Dubbed Isilon Cloud for GCP, the managed NAS offering will use Google cloud instances to provide scale-out NAS services on Google Cloud Platform.

The service will be deployed in Google’s GCP cloud, built on software instances of Isilon’s OneFS operating system (OS) managed by Dell EMC to allow enterprises to deploy distributed NAS storage in the cloud.

According to Dell EMC, Isilon Cloud for GCP will allow customers to deploy a dedicated and secure Isilon infrastructure with sub-millisecond latency access to GCP Compute Engine clusters. Dell EMC will monitor and support the environment, while the customer has access to OneFS management interfaces.

The move – announced at its Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas last week – is the latest in a trend towards NAS services in the cloud.

At the end of last year, NetApp and Microsoft signed an accord to bring to market the Azure NFS Enterprise Service, built on NetApp arrays.

More recently, we have seen Elastifile’s distributed NAS in the Google cloud. Now, Dell EMC and Google have knotted an accord to bring Isilon Cloud for GCP to market.

Scale-out NAS is file access storage in which many storage arrays hold data in a single pool. It is often used by customers that have large amounts of unstructured data such as in media and entertainment, but also by those that need to apply analytics to large volumes of file data, such as in life sciences, oil and gas, and automotive simulation.

Isilon Cloud for GCP is not to be confused with Isilon CloudPools, which allow an Isilon cluster to migrate cold data to object storage services on the AWS cloud, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream. CloudPools doesn’t allow NAS services in the cloud but is simply a way of offloading dormant data via an automated tiering mechanism to the cloud.

Isilon Cloud for GCP is in an early access phase and is reserved currently for customers selected by Dell EMC. No pricing has been announced by Dell EMC, nor a date for general availability.