Pratt & Whitney Advances Jet Engine Testing With Move to Clustered Storage

SEATTLE, Oct. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Isilon Systems(R), the leader in clustered storage, today announced that Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Company and global leader in the design, manufacturing and support of aircraft engines, gas turbines and space propulsion systems, has selected Isilon(R) IQ clustered storage as the primary storage system for its gas turbine engine test facilities. The switch to Isilon IQ clustered storage, which is fully integrated with its new asset management system, has enabled Pratt & Whitney to enjoy significant increases in productivity and collaboration. By unifying the test results from previously disparate data sources into one large single pool of storage, Isilon clustered storage has enabled Pratt & Whitney to greatly improve the efficiency, speed and cost of its engine test operations.

"The use of clustered storage produces meaningful improvements in our jet engine testing," said Dr. Zbigniew Grabowski, engineering information technology program manager for Pratt & Whitney. "Isilon IQ has enabled us to streamline our testing analysis and appreciably reduce costs while maintaining our uncompromising commitment to safety and quality."

To bring its products to market and achieve certification with a myriad of government agencies, Pratt & Whitney conducts exhaustive engine tests, which generate many terabytes of engine test data each year. Due to the extremely high bandwidth requirements of its tests, which can record more than 100,000 samples per second, Pratt & Whitney previously used a custom aeronautical storage system, but one that proved to be difficult to manage and did not provide file-based access to its datasets. The switch to Isilon IQ clustered storage enabled Pratt & Whitney to eliminate multiple islands of storage, collect and store its engine test data on one unified system, and provide extremely fast, file-based access to all data for its engineers and analysis applications.

"Pratt and Whitney's use of clustered storage for their zero-tolerance engine testing programs is a significant milestone for the broad adoption of clustered storage," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development for Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ clustered storage was built from the ground up for mission-critical unstructured data and was designed to enable companies like Pratt and Whitney to accelerate their manufacturing testing workflow and lower costs."

A pioneer in flight and aerospace technology, celebrating its 80th year, Pratt & Whitney engines power nearly half the world's commercial fleet -- every few seconds, more than 20,000 times a day, a Pratt & Whitney-powered airliner takes flight somewhere in the world. Pratt & Whitney is currently developing the GP7000 engine for the 555 passenger Airbus A380, as well as providing military power for twenty-seven countries' front line military fighters, including the F-15, F-16, F/A-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. As a global leader in manufacturing, Pratt & Whitney has representatives in 76 cities and 47 nations that support about 16,000 commercial engines and nearly 11,000 military engines. Pratt & Whitney is a division of United Technologies Corporation, a company whose stock is one of the 30 which comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Isilon IQ and the OneFS(TM) distributed file system seamlessly integrated with Pratt & Whitney's existing applications and infrastructure. By creating a single pool of networked storage, which can be seamlessly grown to more than 160 Terabytes in a single file system, Isilon IQ linearly scales capacity and performance in less than 60 seconds and allows Pratt & Whitney to rapidly expand its storage environment without system downtime.

Isilon recently announced the next generation of its award-winning Isilon IQ family of clustered storage systems -- the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 -- which are powered by the latest version of Isilon's award-winning OneFS(TM) distributed file system software and use high speed, low-latency InfiniBand for intracluster communication.

About Isilon Systems

Isilon is the leader in clustered storage. Isilon's award-winning family of Isilon IQ products consists of high-performance clustered storage systems that combine an intelligent distributed file system with modular industry-standard hardware to deliver unmatched simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ was designed for unstructured data and for use in data-intensive markets such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and government. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture, Madrona Venture Group and Focus Ventures. For more information, please visit: http://www.isilon.com/ .

NOTE: The names of companies mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.