If you watched some of the Winter Olympics games recently held in Torino, Italy – you probably saw movie clips that were stored on Isilon IQ storage systems.In fact, according to Brett Goodwin, VP of marketing and business development for Isilon Systems, NBC stored the majority of their games coverage on a 15 TB sized, clustered IQ system. – “And we did not give away the system for free” – Goodwin adds.Should you be interested?Indeed you should. According to a recent study conducted by ESG, 58 percent of all new data created by corporations or government agencies is unstructured or file based, tells me Goodwin. Moreover, the same study estimates that by 2010 the increase in digital archiving capacity will tower at more than 27 exabytes, a ten fold increase over 2005.If your company’s data will increase in a similar way, you will probably outgrow the capacity and performance limits of your file systems, and will have to give your NAS an early retirement.Could this be the reason why some large storage vendors purchased companies with a different perspective on file serving? The EMC-Rainfinity, and NetApp-Spinnaker acquisitions are good examples. Probably, but Goodwin doesn’t seem concerned by those acquisitions. ” Our OneFS is the world most advanced distributed file system” – he explains – ” and combines three traditionally separate layers, file system, volume manager and RAID into one”.A diagram should help clarifying how the Isilon IQ system would fit in your datacenter. View image Goodwin adds that the IQ system is an easy to manage cluster of peer units connected by Infiniband or GbE and that files are striped across all nodes, which improves performance, reliability and ensure fast rebuilds of failed drives.Adding a new unit triggers an automatic restriping of existing files, which quickly brings more performance and resilience to the whole storage system. My conversation with Isilon was to learn about some new products their are announcing, which includes a new version of their file system, OneFS 4.0, a performance booster appliance and a capacity expansion module. Perhaps the most attention-getting new features of OneFS 4.0 are increasing the total capacity to over 500TB and reaching an aggregate throughput of 7GB per second.I can’t refrain from asking Goodwin if the Isilon IQ architecture can speed up also database access. Not at the moment, he answers, but in the future, with faster connectivity, clustered systems could offer better transactional performance than traditional flat SANs.So, don’t put on eBay your SAN quite yet, but if your NAS system is becoming a straight jacket for your business, the new Isilon IQ products’ layout is worth considering.