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The Five Core Tenets of Scale-Out NAS: Page 3 of 3

He adds, "EMC Isilon was the only option that didn't force us to compromise on performance, scalability or ease of use as we scale to petabytes and as nodes grow in capacity. We've been here for over 200 years, so we are used to thinking long-term. We trust Isilon will go the distance with us."

Others agree that simplicity and scalability are key requirements for working with big data. Alex Younts, engineer, Purdue University, says, "We tested EMC Isilon with our statistics department, which must often analyze huge data sets. EMC Isilon's multiprotocol capabilities provided fast and reliable delivery of data to our statisticians, demonstrating the potential to increase the time spent on actually doing the science, while reducing management costs."

Of course, EMC is not the only vendor in the scale-out storage space. IBM Storage Systems Research is part of the company's overall annual R&D investment of $6 billion, and it is focusing its attention on a key set of initiatives that includes scale-out file systems. Startup Scale Computing delivers scale-out, unified storage for the mid-market, providing enterprise-class storage based on IBM's General Purpose File System (GPFS) at SMB prices for either SMBs or departments, such as a developer group or research team, in a larger organization.

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