Pillar Axiom Topped EMC, IBM and NetApp in Price and Performance

Pillar Data Systems announced that its Pillar Axiom 600 storage system achieved outstanding performance and leading price-performance results for business-class storage based on its first SPC-1 Benchmark Result. The Pillar Axiom delivered better overall performance and price-performance than similarly priced and configured products from EMC, IBM and NetApp.

SPC-1 consists of a single workload designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage subsystem while performing the typical functions of business-critical applications. The Pillar Axiom 600 achieved an SPC-1 performance result of 64,992.77 SPC-1 IOPS with an SPC-1 price-performance result of $8.79/SPC-1 IOPS, which is the most cost effective SPC-1 result for business-class storage arrays.

As tested and published on the SPC website, the EMC CLARiiON CX3-40 achieved an SPC-1 performance result of 24,997.49 SPC-1 IOPS with an SPC-1 price-performance result of $20.72/SPC-1 IOPS.

The IBM DS-5300 achieved an SPC-1 performance result of 58,158.69 SPC-1 IOPS with a price-performance result of $12.42/SPC-1 IOPS.

The NetApp FAS3170 achieved an SPC-1 performance result of 60,515.34 SPC-1 IOPS with an SPC-1 price performance result of $10.01/SPC-1 IOPS.

“While we are thrilled with producing an outstanding first SPC-1 Benchmark Result, we expect the Axiom will do even better under the intense real-world customer workloads for which it was designed. The ability of the Axiom to handle an influx of data while maintaining its high utilization rates and low operating costs is an area where the Pillar Axiom excels and truly differentiates itself from all competitors,” said Bob Maness, vice president of worldwide marketing, Pillar Data Systems.

The performance of applications depends on I/O and transfer rates, not capacity alone. It was with this premise that the Axiom was designed. The Pillar Axiom 600 increases efficiency by assigning priorities to applications and reducing I/O bottlenecks, while increasing transfer rates. As such, the Pillar system can sustain utilization rates well above 80 percent without compromising performance. With guaranteed 80 percent utilization, the Pillar Axiom can not only outperform the competition but lets customers use more of the capacity they buy.

Pillar customer Baylor College of Medicine needed the ability to store large amounts of data from its MRI scanners, which require high performance and reliability. Baylor recognized the value of the Axiom when it compared its high utilization rates to that of its competitors. Justin King, the senior system administrator for The Human Neuroimaging Laboratory (HNL) at Baylor College of Medicine, notes, “Our lab relies on the ultra high performance and utilization rates provided by the Axiom storage system to power research projects that use functional MRI experiments for brain imaging, theoretical neuroscience and behavioral research, which generate an excessive amount of data. Pillar is the only company that guarantees us screaming application performance levels as well as overall storage efficiency in the data center.”