Ask The Expert – Isilon’s New Releases: IsilonSD Edge, OneFS.NEXT and CloudPools

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Hello,

what's new in OneFS.NEXT in terms of upgrades/roll-back functionality ? 

Thanks

To expand on dynamox's question, can you give more details on release rollback and level of disruption when performing one?

Have the IsilonSD the same features (smartpols,InsightIQ,etc) of the hardware version?

Why is there a 36TB limit on IsilonSD? Will that be increased in the future? It really limits the utility of the system. I'm much more interested in using it to essentially build non-standard nodes (more cpu, ram, faster ethernet) that would not be particularly commercially viable for EMC, but that size makes it a non-starter.

As far as the level of disruption in the upgrades, will OneFS.Next finally stomp the clusterwide hangs caused by group change issues? 7.2.1 is better, but still not good enough...

To expand on these question even further, what happens to config changes done after an upgrade when that upgrade gets rolled back? Revert to config settings from before the upgrade, or back-migrate the changes? Think of creating new shares, modifying quotas or network settings.

Thank you

-- Peter

What else will be new beyond edge, cloud and roll-back? Interested in performance of NAS and job engine, SSD usage modes, and monitoring/reporting.

Thank you

-- Peter

To follow on to Peter's question, will there be changes to how L3 is structured/allocated? I've put in requests before to be able to designate some SSDs in a node pool for L3 and others for GNA, if one has, say, 6 SSDs/node in some pools and other pools with no SSDs.

--Ken

Hi Carlilek,

Please say more. Are you looking at datacenter scale deployment and with which non-standard typed of HW are you interested? 36TB managed capacity are intended primarily for  Edge location deployments.

Yes. the IsilonSD Edge will have all major data services available, including ability to replicate data, snapshot, etc.

It means from the new OneFS.Next, you will be able to perform rolling upgrades for your nodes without restarting the entire cluster, which helps to lead to improved upgrade reliability.

Rollback gives you ability to take a recently or partially upgraded version and return to a fully operational state on a previously installed version. Specific details on upgrade and rollback rules will be available in product documentations at GA.

Could we use CloudPool as a disaster recovery solution?

Hello go.y,

CloudPools is intended to be an archive solution where customers can archive their cold, infrequently used data to one of the supported cloudpools targets. It is not going to be a second copy of data in the cloud. The data stored in the cloud will be pointed to by smartlinks (stubs) on the OneFS cluster. You can copy/syncIQ these smartlinks (stubs) to another Isilon Cluster that can be used for Failover purposes in case your primary Isilon cluster becomes unavailable.

Thanks

kt