March 12, 2007

Isilon Systems
Sujal Patel
Founder & CTO

How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?

Simply, Isilon established and executed on a simple, yet visionary value proposition that has driven our business since day one. We recognized the oncoming avalanche of digital content, which is now upon us with no signs of slowing, and optimized our clustered storage solutions to address the unique challenges associated with storing and managing digital content – the fastest growing segment of data in the world today. Since our founding, we recognized the need for a novel approach to overcome the limitations of traditional storage solutions in storing and managing digital content. We architected our storage solutions, including our intelligent operating system software, to leverage the power of clustered systems and high-performance, industry-standard commodity hardware.

By combing industry-standard hardware with intelligent, proprietary software, Isilon is able to deliver the most leading-edge, cost-effective clustered storage solutions to our customers, while optimizing our business model to take advantage of the continuing decline in hardware costs and the high margins associated with software development and delivery.

What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?

Life Sciences and Drug Discovery is moving – and will continue to move – out of the Petri dish and into the datacenter. As digital microscopes continue to become more and more prevalent in these industries, along with advancements in areas such as neuro imaging, cellular imaging and genome mapping, life sciences and drug discovery will continue to produce increasing amounts of digital content and companies will look to new ways to efficiently and reliably store, manage and deliver this data to researchers, partners and the public at large.

Life Sciences leaders like Cedars-Sinai Prostate Cancer Center, UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) and the Austin Radiological Association are already using Isilon IQ clustered storage to convert their data into information – and their information into breakthroughs. These companies recognize that digital content is critical to their work and their business and have deployed clustered storage as the ideal solution to address the challenges of this burgeoning category of data.

What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?

Isilon Systems is the worldwide leader in clustered storage systems and software for digital content, 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.

Powered by OneFS, 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 IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, Accelerator, and EX 6000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.

Research and development in the life sciences and drug discovery fields is increasingly characterized by statistically driven, information-based analyses using proteomic, genomic, and DNA sequencing data. In addition, new digital microscopes can capture digital images with 18 megapixel resolution having 3D display capability. As a result, life science professionals are required to store, retrieve and analyze increasingly large amounts of digital content. For instance, in the area of cancer research, an image of a single drop of blood taken by a mass spectrometer creates over 60 gigabytes of data. As scientists build appropriate sample sizes for research projects, they can collect tens of thousands and, ultimately, millions of data files over the course of their research.

Isilon IQ clustered storage is optimized to address the digital content storage needs of the life sciences and drug discovery industries as its unique clustered architecture provides “pay as you grow” scaling of both capacity and performance, either independently or linearly. Isilon IQ clustered storage delivers next-generation clustered storage with unparalleled ease of use, scalability, performance, reliability and cost-efficiency. With Isilon IQ, life sciences and drug discovery companies have an ideal solution for storing their digital content and maximizing the value of their data.

What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?

As a public company, Isilon is unable to speak to such a question publicly at this time. However, we did just release the IQ 200, which was recently profiled in Bio-IT World at http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2007/01-26-07-isilon

Where do you see your company in five years?

Isilon is committed to leveraging its proven and successful business model to continue to build a company of lasting value over the next five years, and beyond. We will continue to deliver innovative, next-generation clustered storage products to our customers, enabling them to insert their critical information back into the bloodstream of their business and maximize the value of their digital content, while dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of storing it.