Isilon touted two new clustered NAS arrays, the S200 and X200. The arrays are able to use a combination of serial ATA (SATA), serial SCSI (SAS) or solid-state drives (SSDs) in a tiered configuration, affording varying degrees of performance. The arrays use a single name space under which petabytes of data can be stored.

Isilon's technology requires a minimum of three 2U (3.5-in. high) nodes to create a cluster; once a cluster has been created, nodes can be added one at a time.

Isilon also announced version 6.5 of its OneFS operating system, which it said delivers improved function and performance for mission-critical data center operations. The company also announced it has fully integrated its SyncIQ 3.0 software with SnapshotIQ, offering data replication and recovery services under a single user interface.

Jonathan Young, senior vice president of operations for Ancestry.com, said his company witnessed a two to three times performance improvement when it tested Isilon's new versions of OneFS and SyncIQ. It cited the CIFS enhancements in OneFS for the improvements.

"SyncIQ's use of snapshots significantly improved both the application's efficiency and its performance," he said.