Pillar Data Systems Pushes Performance Boundaries Again: Delivers Highest Performance, Highest Value

By VSM News Staff
published: Tuesday, January 19 2010

New Axiom Slammer Series 2 Boosts Performance by 50% with Double the Cache and Processing Power At No Additional Cost

San Jose, Calif. – January 19, 2010 – Pillar Data Systems is again raising the bar for storage performance and efficiency by helping customers get the most optimal dollar per IOP with their existing storage resources. IT managers know the need to demonstrate a clear return on storage investment has never been higher. With today’s announcement, Pillar makes that much easier. Significant advancements to the Axiom 600TM storage system with the new Slammer Series 2 deliver the highest performance and highest value to the industry. This new Slammer combined with Pillar’s fourth generation AxiomONE™ software delivers more flexibility and investment protection with twice the cache and twice the processing power, for a 50% increase in overall performance.

The Slammer Series 2 leverages Pillar’s patented Quality of Service (QoS) capability in the AxiomONE software suite, enabling customers to further differentiate application IO workloads by promoting and/or demoting the QoS of a LUN or filesystem by Slammer and drive type. Because the new Slammer Series 2 works in conjunction with first-generation Slammers, customers can leverage their existing storage pools, ensuring optimal investment protection.

With multiple applications running in the same environment, such as e-mail, databases, back-up and video streaming, customers have more ways to allocate storage resources to each data type for maximum performance and efficiency.

“Users continue to look for ways to balance performance needs with application requirements. They shouldn’t be faced with massive or costly upgrades to their entire system when they embark on a new project or simply have changing priorities,” said Simon Robinson, Storage Research Director, The 451 Group. “Technical advancements like Pillar’s new Slammer give customers more flexibility so they can customize their storage environment to suit their individual business needs at any given time. Because it’s more customized, there’s less waste and greater efficiency.”   

Data Center Demands Rise

The pressure continues to mount for IT managers to consolidate multiple applications on fewer data center infrastructure resources. Yet, business needs have demanded that application performance improve. The new advancements in the Axiom allow customers to protect their investments by being able to choose the optimal configuration based on their business needs, and in turn, the needs of their applications.

The Axiom as a Cloud Platform

Pillar Axiom is an ideal storage platform for cloud environments because of its flexibility, performance, scalability and unique QoS capabilities. Much like Pillar did with its SSD and 2 terabyte SATA drives, the company is again making it possible to extend new product technology into a system without disruption, giving cloud providers new flexibility in deploying and morphing storage to meet diverse user and application requirements.

In a separate press release today, Eagle Business Solutions announced that Pillar Axiom has been chosen as the storage platform to support its cloud-based, application hosting service.

“It was the Axiom’s ability to easily delineate storage resources to individual applications that compelled us to standardize on it in for our new cloud service,” said Richard Wood, COO, Eagle Business Solutions. “A key challenge for cloud service providers is the ability to ensure that Service Level Agreements are enforced. Because the Axiom takes the guess work out of scaling capacity and the resulting performance, we can guarantee our customers the same level of storage efficiency that Pillar customers demand.”

Slammer Series 2Product Details

Slammer storage controllers are the high-performance, high-reliability data movers and managers for Pillar Axiom Storage systems. Each Slammer is a high-availability subsystem, providing connectivity between internal storage resources and external application hosts and management interfaces. These components are tightly integrated with Pillar’s AxiomONE software suite, enabling intuitive storage management, configuration and monitoring.

Pillar’s Slammer Series 2 boasts a 50 percent increase in IOPS as well as:

• Double the cache
• Double the CPU horsepower
• A 4X increase in CIFS connections
• A 2X increase in number of vLUNs 
• 30% increase in backend performance
• 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drive Brick support

Today’s news underscores Pillar’s mission to make storage efficiency a reality. Last year, Pillar introduced an SSD-enabled Axiom that continues to deliver the single best $/IOP in the storage market, and drives down overall power consumption by up to 85 percent. Pillar also introduced the first enterprise-class 2TB SATA drive that increases capacity, while consuming less space and energy.

The Axiom 600 Slammer Series 2 started shipping in late 2009, and is now generally available through Pillar and its authorized resellers.

About Pillar Data Systems

Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops Application-Aware Storage systems for midsize and enterprise organizations.  With the highest utilization rates in the storage industry, the Pillar Axiom solution is the most efficient storage system on the market today. The Pillar Axiom cuts administrative time and total cost of ownership by more than 50 percent as well as provides the only storage system that can differentiate services based on application priority. Designed from the ground up as the only true Application-Aware Storage system, the Pillar Axiom allows users to match multiple application characteristics to the appropriate service levels within a single storage platform. Pillar Data Systems is privately funded by Tako Ventures, LLC, the venture arm of Larry Ellison.

The company is headquartered at 2840 Junction Avenue, San Jose, California 95134. The company can be reached on the Web at www.pillardata.com , by phone at 408-503-4000 or by email at sales@pillardata.com .