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Pillar: Smart, Green Storage Needs Application AwarenessBy Pedro HernandezJuly 1, 2008
Last year, early into what's become an epidemic of green IT (of the welcome sort), Pillar Data Systems made waves with a storage platform that not only touted energy efficiency through increased utilization, but also addressed keeping application performance on par with best-of- breed, dedicated arrays. Central to the Pillar's strategy is improving utilization by intelligently pooling, in a way virtualizing, NAS and SAN storage with a healthy dash of automation to reduce management overhead and tame capital and operational expenditures. Needless to say, it's a prospect that makes SAN administrators leery at first. Now that soaring energy costs, ballooning capacity requirements and worries over the environment are starting to impact data centers operations, many are warming to the idea of maximizing their storage assets. Essentially, explains Pillar's CEO, Mike Workman, "70 percent of storage is not used," adding that administrators "don't share storage to protect performance." However, he feels that Axiom has proven its worth and provided customers savings in over 350 successful Axiom deployments across 16 countries that IT managers can "stop the stove piping." Early feedback from customers already running Axiom 600s confirms this, he says. Today, Pillar added the Axiom 600, 600MC (mission critical, mirrored) and upgraded AxiomONE 3.1 management software to the company's green-tinted storage portfolio. Supplanting the 500 series as the flagship, the new offerings build on the company's self-prioritizing, application-aware technology akin to QoS in the realm of data networks. Quality of service (QoS) is nothing new to the world of networking. Even some home routers allow users to prioritize traffic so that critical applications get the breathing room they need. But Pillar takes the concept into the realm of storage to assure that their pooled storage platform -- up to 1.6 PB raw capacity for the 600M -- doesn't require compromises in application performance despite handling data of varying levels of business worth. One example is optional Oracle integration. Aimed at shops running Oracle applications and Database 10g and 11g, Axiom/Oracle Automatic Storage Manager integration automatically optimizes storage for fast, consistent I/O operations. Plus, a new option grants Oracle the ability to write in 1MB stripes -- the largest in the industry, according to the company -- to boost throughput. This level of tuning isn't exclusive to Oracle, however. Other application profiles, accessible via the management console, encompass VMware, Exchange, SQL, and virtual tape library platforms. Custom templates take over for homegrown applications. So confident is the company in the Axiom 600 that they guarantee up to 80 percent disk utilization, five-nines availability and industry leading dollar per IOP. In addition, Workman makes a bold prediction about Pillar's approach smart storage platforms. "The beauty of this," he tells Enterprise IT Planet, "is that in five years, everyone that uses disks will do this." Axiom 600 and 600M are available now.
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