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Pillar Data Systems launches next generation of Application-Aware storage

~ Pillar guarantees greater utilisation, availability and performance with introduction of Pillar Axiom 600™, Pillar Axiom 600MC™ ~

July 01, 2008

Pillar Data Systems the leading provider of Application-Aware storage systems, has introduced the Axiom 600™ and Pillar Axiom 600MC (Mission Critical), with new application profiles, industry-leading utilisation, performance, and per system availability rates.

Pillar Axiom 600 pushes the boundaries of next generation Application-Aware storage, by delivering, and in an industry first, guaranteeing:

• 80-percent disk utilisation: the highest in the industry and double the industry average
• The single best £/IOP in the industry and the ability to scale performance without utilisation degradation
• 99.999 per cent availability, or less than five minutes of downtime per year, per system
• Additional Application-Aware Storage Profiles to meet the changing demands of the data centre today and for the future

The Axiom 600 extends Pillar’s legacy of innovation, including Quality of Service (QoS), native NAS and SAN, distributed RAID, Guided Maintenance, and leading storage efficiency.

The Pillar Axiom 600 is a next generation storage system ideally suited to complement the next generation data centre. As the world’s data centres continue to evolve, the value proposition and market differentiation of the Axiom platform grows exponentially.

Pillar Axiom 600 continues the company’s leadership in Application-Aware storage by bringing additional application profiles into the Axiom Pilot management framework. Pillar Axiom has added new profiles for VMware, multiple Oracle applications, VTL deployments, Microsoft Exchange, SQL, as well as a host of others. These pre-configured and user-customisable profiles allow the user to optimise their Pillar Axiom systems for specific applications simply by selecting the appropriate profiles from a pull down menu in the management GUI.

The Pillar Axiom 600 easily and cost-effectively optimises storage for applications running in any virtualised server (VM) environment. The Axiom 600 has the ability to dynamically assign or re-assign priorities to applications the business deems most important to improve overall storage performance, while reducing the I/O bottleneck seen in legacy storage systems. Because the Axiom 600 is tuned to work effectively in virtualised environments, it can support 50 per cent more virtual machines than competitive products.

Pillar Axiom further distinguishes itself as an optimal storage platform for Oracle applications. Oracle Databases running Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and Pillar Axiom storage deliver high performance, while providing an easy-to-use management environment. The Pillar Axiom/Oracle Automatic Storage Management integration with Oracle® Database 10g takes the guesswork out of database tuning, simplifies storage management, and delivers optimal database I/O performance automatically.

Pillar now provides Oracle write operations to occur in 1MB ‘wide stripes’ – the largest in the industry – resulting in higher throughput between Pillar storage and requesting applications running in Oracle environments. No other storage system on the market today offers this functionality for Oracle databases and applications.

The Axiom 600 and the Axiom 600MC are currently available worldwide, through both Pillar and authorised channel partners.

Executive quote

“With the Axiom 600 and 600MC, Pillar is now competing at a whole new level, allowing us to gain a greater foothold in the enterprise market where we’ve had success against our more entrenched competitors,” said Mike Workman chairman and CEO, Pillar Data Systems. “By deploying Pillar Axiom, customers can now derive maximum performance, functionality and industry leading utilisation rates – and we’re the only ones in the industry to guarantee it.”

“With this new capability, Pillar Axiom can integrate with Oracle’s ASM, as well as write data in 1MB stripes, the exact way our applications prefer it,” said Mark Salser, senior vice president, Oracle. “Pillar’s 1MB striping with ASM in a RAID 5 configuration is a significant development and should help drive down the cost and complexity of customer solutions. Pillar has always integrated well with Oracle, and today’s announcement is another proof point to how closely the companies work together.”

Analyst quote

“Storage systems must address the fast expanding and increasingly diverse storage needs of datacentres by delivering greater efficiency, more scalability, higher utilisation rates, and more sophisticated data management capabilities that work seamlessly with business applications,” said Richard Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC. “With solutions like Pillar’s Axiom 600 that focus on delivering more powerful, flexible, and intelligent storage systems, datacentre executives will be in a better position to respond to their organisation's evolving application requirements.”

“Making your storage optimised for your application seems obvious, but it isn't the way it happens. Mostly, its one size fits all - take it or leave it. I really like the idea of storage that changes to fit the application environment and the fact that Pillar is willing to guarantee it speaks volumes,” said Steve Duplessie, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

About the company

Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops Application-Aware Storage systems for midsize and enterprise organisations. With the highest utilisation 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 in San Jose, California with a development office in Longmont, Colorado. The EMEA headquarters is in Drogheda near Dublin, with initial operations across Ireland, UK, Germany and France.

Contact details

For further information, please contact:

Sarah Douglas at LEWIS

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7802 2626

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7802 2627

Email: sarahd@lewispr.com

Web: www.lewispr.com

Technorati tags: Pillar Data Systems | Pillar Axiom 600(MC) | Application-Aware storage systems | data centres |

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