Isilon® Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), the leader in clustered storage, today announced that Isilon IQ X-Series clustered storage systems have been certified and integrated with VMware® ESX 3.5. Isilon's clustered storage systems create a high performance and highly scalable, single, shared pool of storage - delivering up to 20 Gigabytes per second of performance and 2.3 Petabytes of capacity in a single file system and single volume - to enable instant access to critical business information, while dramatically reducing the costs and complexity of managing storage growth. By combining Isilon clustered storage with VMware Infrastructure and VMware ESX 3.5, enterprises can eliminate traditional storage as a bottleneck and create a scale out, virtualized infrastructure - from servers to storage - which increases data center flexibility and utilization while reducing costs.

"Just as virtualization is quickly becoming a standard in major enterprises for both simplifying the overhead and reducing the cost of managing large-scale server environments, so too is scale out storage for file-based data, as enterprises look to address storage infrastructure complexity, cost and performance issues," said Paul Rutherford, CTO, Isilon Systems. "By combining Isilon's X-Series clustered storage systems with VMware Infrastructure 3.5, enterprise businesses can achieve new levels of innovation and business agility while dramatically reducing the costs and complexity of their IT infrastructure."

Using VMware ESX 3.5, enterprise businesses can streamline their IT infrastructure into single points of management for both server and storage, maximizing the utilization, flexibility and value of these resources. As a result of deploying these virtualized computing environments, the performance, ease of use and cost reduction requirements for enterprise storage increase and serve to considerably amplify the challenges of traditional SAN and NAS storage systems.

By combining VMware Infrastructure 3.5 with Isilon X-Series clustered storage systems, enterprise businesses can obtain the efficiency and high availability that VMware Infrastructure 3.5 offers in the storage environment and eliminate the barriers associated with traditional storage. This integration delivers a scale out, virtualized IT infrastructure with servers, network connections, and storage all consolidated into single points of management, significantly improving scalability, performance and ease of use across the entire data center, while dramatically reducing IT overhead.

Powered by OneFS®, Isilon IQ X-Series delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of file-based data, setting the standard for scale out file storage. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator-x, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ®, SmartConnect™, SmartQuotas™, and SyncIQ® that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.