The Backup Accelerator appliance works with Isilon's NAS cluster to speed up backups of file-based data.Isilon Systems this week launched the Backup Accelerator, a 1U appliance that works with the company's NAS boxes to speed file-based backups to tape. The appliance eliminates the need for NAS boxes to write to the backup system.

Appliances can be deployed in a one-to-one ration with NAS servers, but Isilon says a common deployment is one appliance on top of a cluster of three NAS devices. More appliances can be deployed as the cluster grows.

The appliance includes four 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports and communicates to the tape backup system via Infiniband. The company says the appliance offers 480Mbytes per second per accelerator node. The accelerator has 8Gbytes of RAM and is built around a pair of quad-core Intel processors.

The appliance can be managed with a variety of software, including Symantec NetBackup, IBM Tivoli and EMC Networker, as well as backup software from Commvault, Bakbone and Atempo.

A single appliance includes Isilon's OneFS OS and lists for $38,500.

The company also announced SyncIQ 2.5. The latest version of the replication software streamlines replication from one Isilon cluster to another. In previous versions, any time a file was changed, the software replicated the entire file. In 2.5, only blocks that have been changed get copied, reducing the impact on LAN/WAN bandwidth.

In addition, the company announced it has increased its maximum cluster size from 96 nodes to a total of 144, enabling customers to get a single file system of 5.2Pbytes of raw storage. The company says about 20 percent of that raw storage will be lost to data protection.