Pillar Adds 50 Percent More Capacity to Axiom with Industry's Highest Utilization Guarantee

By VSM News Staff
published: Wednesday, November 05 2008

Pillar Pushes the Boundaries of Storage Capacity, Performance and Utilization; Only Vendor to Guarantee 80 Percent Utilization Rates.

San Jose, Calif. - November 5, 2008 - Pillar Data Systems, the leading provider of Application-Aware storage systems, today announced the availability of 450GB 15,000 RPM fibre channel drives for the Pillar Axiom 600. The new disk drives add 50 percent more fibre channel capacity to the Axiom, all of which is backed by Pillar's 80 percent utilization guarantee. The Pillar Axiom now offers the broadest range of disk drive options in the industry, allowing customers to intermix both fibre channel and SATA drives in multiple capacity points.

"As drive capacities increase in size, it becomes more and more important to work with a storage vendor whose product can not only take full advantage of the performance of these newer drives, but also the expanded capacity," said Mike Workman, CEO and Chairman, Pillar Data Systems. "The Axiom's unrivaled utilization rates mean customers can reduce their storage purchases by more than 50 percent, without sacrificing capacity or performance. Once again, Pillar takes storage efficiency to a whole new level."

QoS FC/SATA Migration

The Pillar Axiom has the unique ability to offer two types of QoS data migration functionality that fully leverages the differing characteristics of fibre channel and SATA drives. The first mode of data migration is permanent, where infrequently accessed or non-critical data is transparently moved to lower cost, higher capacity SATA drives. Conversely, mission critical, often accessed data is stored on the higher performance, ultra reliable fibre channel drives. The Axiom allows the administrator to choose between user initiated and automated data migration for LUNs and file systems.

Temporary data migration functionality in the Axiom allows for dynamic reassignment of QoS levels based on the real-time need of the application. For example, in a database being created for transaction processing, the QoS level is set accordingly to allow for optimal OLTP transactions; however, the initial load of the data is a sequential operation. The database can be created in the proper QoS setting for OLTP, and then the QoS level can be temporarily changed to high performance write sequential bias to make the initial load operation much faster. Once the initial load is completed, the QoS setting can be reverted back to the original, optimal QoS setting.

Further, the Pillar Axiom 600 pushes the boundaries of next generation Application-Aware storage, by being the first to deliver and to guarantee:

• 80 percent disk utilization: the highest in the industry and double the industry average;
• The single best $/IOP in the industry and the ability to scale performance and capacity without utilization degradation;
• 99.999 percent availability per system; and
• A wide range of Application-Aware Storage Profiles designed to simplify storage provisioning and optimize the storage system for multiple applications.

"Now more than ever, IT professionals need to demand the highest levels of efficiency from their IT providers; and traditionally storage has been an efficiency black hole," said Dennis Martin, Demartek. "Those inefficiencies are generally caused by unnecessary complexity and poor utilization rates of traditional storage systems. Companies like Pillar are changing the game. They're offering easier storage provisioning and management, and unprecedented utilization rates. What sets Pillar apart is they're willing to stand behind these claims with written guarantees."