Heyyyy, I was wondering when someone would bring up Isilon! My idea is influenced in part by several key concepts of their architecture, and they have a great product in general - I'm not sure if 50PB in a single pool is the current top dog, but I remember the days when their engineering lab built the world's very first petabyte-scale unified storage pool. Pretty freakin' cool.

Speaking of which, I had no idea they started offering block-level options in OneFS! Man, THAT'S exciting - I remember when they first talked about it, always sounded like a far-off dream.

As far as a comparison with my platform, you got it right: the primary differentiation would be price point and complexity. Isilon has, in my opinion, not been a player in the markets I want to get into - this is mainly because of price, as they aren't cheap. But it's also because of complexity - Isilon still relies on Infiniband for their infrastructure networking, meaning if you want to connect their nodes together (why wouldn't you, it's kind of their whole point) you have to invest in that technology, which at this point in time you are unlikely to have already implemented.

Now, that might not seem like a big deal - IB isn't all that expensive, especially when compared with a minimum 3-node Isilon config (is it still a 3-node minimum? It used to be!). But if you ask a small-enterprise CIO if they want to spend ~$25k on a separate storage network, I can tell you what he's likely to say: "I have other things I want to invest that capital in." That's been the answer every time it's come up for me. This is the primary reason I'm aiming to compete on price, to attract the people that operate on thin envelopes of affordability and can't be asked to over-complicate their environment just to get the storage they need.