Rice University Preserves History With Isilon IQ

Rice University Preserves History With Isilon IQ

Distinguished University and Research Institution Uses Isilon Clustered Storage to Create Central Digital Media Repository

SEATTLE, April 8, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Isilon(R) Systems (NASDAQ:ISLN), the leader in clustered storage, today announced that Rice University has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as its central repository for digital multimedia, including video of selected speeches by international dignitaries and musical performances from the Shepherd School of Music. In an effort to preserve the many historic events held at these prestigious venues and ensure the productions are available to the public into perpetuity, Rice has deployed Isilon clustered storage to consolidate hundreds of recorded musical performances and keynote speeches into a single, highly scalable and reliable shared pool of storage for the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive, an institutional repository based on the DSpace software platform.

"For decades, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Shepherd School have been renowned across the country for the prestigious litany of speakers and concerts held here at Rice University every year," said Geneva Henry, Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative, Rice University. "Isilon's clustered storage systems enable us to preserve and reliably deliver these one-of-a-kind events as part of our mission to cultivate a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor."

Through a cooperative effort between Rice University's Digital Library Initiative, Fondren Library and Central IT department, the university has created a central repository for all its critical multi-media content, enabling a variety of departments to execute on vital, content-driven projects simultaneously, activity that was impossible with traditional storage. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Rice's storage management for the Digital Scholarship archiving system was unable to effectively support management of large digital video and audio files that required streaming for delivery. These assets, therefore, were stored on a variety of streaming servers by various groups across campus, creating multiple access bottlenecks that led to inefficient storage management and undue IT cost and complexity. By unifying all of its digital content onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage system, Rice University has removed costly data access and management barriers and dramatically simplified its storage architecture. Additionally, using Isilon's SmartQuotas(TM) provisioning and quota management software application, Rice is also storing its Language Center's multi-media course work and its Central IT department's webcasts on Isilon IQ, delivering immediate, concurrent data access to multiple users and user groups, further reducing storage management costs to maximize system efficiency.

Rice University will stream its collection of musical performances from the Shepherd School, as well as its video library of the many world leaders and dignitaries that have spoken at the Baker Institute, to thousands of users online. This operation necessitates the use of multiple media servers, using Windows, Quicktime and Real Player formats. Isilon clustered storage communicates natively over CIFS, NFS FTP, and HTTP, as well as interoperating with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enabling seamless integration with Rice's variety of server formats and enabling all content to be streamed from one, central, easily and immediately accessible storage system. With Isilon IQ, Rice's entire collection of multi-media is accessible to all its servers 24x7x365, ensuring that the media streaming operations are not only efficient and cost-effective, but prepared to meet high user demand.

"Digital content and unstructured data is the fastest growing category of data on earth and is overwhelming traditional storage systems, which were not designed to cost-effectively store and manage the large file sizes, rapid growth and multiple formats common to this category of data," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "As digital content continues to infiltrate organizations, a new storage architecture is necessary to not only efficiently store and manage this data, but also interoperate with the multiple formats and native systems through which this data is created and accessed. Rice University's use of Isilon IQ to unify disparate silos of data and enable multiple departments to concurrently access critical content is exemplary of how clustered storage can significantly reduce storage costs and streamline IT operations."

Powered by OneFS(R), Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ(TM), SmartConnect(TM), SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ(TM) and SyncIQ(R) that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.

About Isilon

Isilon Systems (NASDAQ:ISLN) is the worldwide leader in clustered storage systems and software for digital content and unstructured data, enabling enterprises to transform data into information -- and information into breakthroughs. Isilon's award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems combines Isilon's OneFS operating system software with the latest advances in industry-standard hardware to deliver modular, pay-as-you-grow, enterprise-class storage systems. Isilon's clustered storage solutions speed access to critical business information while dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of storing it. Information about Isilon can be found at http://www.isilon.com/.

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Source: Isilon Systems

CONTACT: Lucas Welch of Isilon Systems, +1-206-315-7621,
lucas.welch@isilon.com

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http://www.isilon.com/

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