Isilon was built for files too big for ordinary storage. Video, medical scans, and research data were piling up in the early 2000s, and the usual systems choked as they grew. Isilon's answer was a cluster: buy a few boxes, and when you need more room, add another, and it joins the rest as one large pool. The Seattle company went public in December 2006, as studios, broadcasters, and labs were moving their work from tape and film to disk.

One Pool, Many Boxes

Sujal Patel and Paul Mikesell founded Isilon in January 2001 to store and manage digital content. They spent the first two years writing OneFS, the operating system that tied every box into a single file system. Each new box added space and speed at once. If one failed, the others kept the data safe. That made it simple to grow from a few terabytes to far more.

Thirteen Dollars to EMC

Isilon priced its IPO at $13 a share on December 15, 2006, on Nasdaq under the ticker ISLN. The stock jumped on its first day. A year later the company had to restate its revenue, and its chief executive left. Patel took over and steadied the business. In late 2010 EMC bought Isilon for about $2.25 billion. Dell later bought EMC, and Isilon's technology lives on in Dell's storage line.

Cover: Rocks at Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île, Claude Monet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for rocks that hold against the sea (storage that lasts).