Case Study: Microsoft Corporation achieves faster time-to-market and massive scalable video storage with Dell EMC Isilon

EMC Isilon supports explosive growth of Xbox Video entertainment service

Microsoft Corporation’s Xbox Video service faced exploding growth in its on‑demand video catalogue that outstripped its SAN and file system, causing performance problems, downtime risks and cumbersome tape archiving. To solve this, Microsoft selected Dell EMC solutions — deploying Isilon OneFS with Isilon X-Series and NL-Series nodes plus Isilon InsightIQ to support high‑speed transcoding and long‑term archiving alongside Microsoft’s custom transcoding applications.

Dell EMC implemented 14.5 petabytes of Isilon scale‑out storage (including an X‑Series production cluster and 96 NL‑Series archive nodes), installed in a day and fully provisioned in under a week, which tripled capacity. The Dell EMC deployment accelerated time‑to‑market for new video content, avoided costly holiday downtime, enabled growth of hundreds of terabytes per month, and reduced storage administration from two FTEs to 0.25 FTE while improving workflow visibility with InsightIQ.

Microsoft Corporation

Chris Lisica

Technical Operations Manager