Isilon snapshots are highly scalable and typically take less than one second to create, incurring little to no performance overhead, regardless of the size of the file system or directory being snapshot or the level of production activity on the cluster. Moreover, only changes to blocks that make up a file are reflected in updates to the current version of snapshots, thereby ensuring highly-efficient snapshot storage utilization.

What makes SnapshotIQ such a breakthrough technology?

Traditional volume-based snapshots, fundamentally unchanged since their creation in the mid-1990s, are limited to a single storage device-and to a single volume. Volume-level solutions limit the number of snapshots that can be taken—for example, to 255. This traditional approach significantly limits the ability to schedule frequent snapshots and the ability to scale. If the gap between scheduled snapshots is too great, changes to files or directories will not be captured and data protection suffers.

Through its flexible design, SnapshotIQ effectively closes the gaps between snapshot schedules, thereby giving storage administrators more flexibility in meeting their respective recovery point and recovery time objectives. The secret behind SnapshotIQ is breaking the one-to-one lock between a snapshot and a storage system. By doing so, SnapshotIQ is able to support an unlimited number of snapshots within a highly-scalable single pool of clustered storage and up to 1,024 snapshots within any single directory.

Isilon's Systems' SnapshotIQ transcends the limits of traditional approaches by reliably distributing an unlimited number of snapshots across multiple, highly available Isilon IQ clustered storage nodes. The result is remarkable simplicity, scalablity and flexibility that enables enterprise-class protection and user-driven data recovery for clustered storage in the most demanding storage environments.