Isilon clustered storage system architecture consists of independent nodes that are all integrated with the OneFS operating system software. The systems can be installed in standard data center environments and are accessible to users and applications running Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac operating systems using industry standard file sharing protocols over standard Gigabit Ethernets.
Nodes within the clustered storage system communicate with each other over a dedicated back-end network which is either Infiniband or standard Gigabit Ethernet. The architecture is designed so that each node has full visibility and write/read access to or from a single expandable file system.
The core technology of the Isilon clustered storage consists of OneFS, which provides a single unified operating system and delivers up to 10 GB/s of throughput. The OneFS operating system software is designed with file-striping functionality across each node in a cluster, a fully distributed lock manager, caching, fully-distributed meta-data, and a remote block manager to maintain global coherency and synchronization across the cluster.