One More Storage Subsystem Vendor Adopting SSD: Pillar

Pillar Data Systems announced it has redefined the capabilities of the enterprise storage market. Through its innovative use of Solid State Drives (SSD) in the Pillar Axiom storage system, Pillar can deliver the single best $/IOP in the storage market today. In fact, Pillar will drive down the $/IOP of SSDs to half that of traditional Fibre Channel drives. Additionally, these new SSD Bricks will drive down overall power consumption by up to 85 percent.

In a recent SPC-1 Benchmark result, the Pillar Axiom ranked first in overall performance and price/performance among similarly priced and configured products from EMC, IBM and NetApp. This announcement significantly extends Pillar’s leadership in helping customers reduce total cost of ownership and achieve data center efficiency.

"In support of Pillar’s promise to drive innovation and help customers maximize ROI, we’re making SSD technology affordable," said Mike Workman, CEO and Chairman, Pillar Data Systems. "Through independent testing, the Pillar Axiom has been established as the most efficient, best performing storage system in its class. Now we’re using Pillar’s patented technology to deliver SSDs in an entirely groundbreaking way."

While it’s clear SSDs deliver a significant performance boost, they also present a serious problem other storage systems cannot address. According to a Gartner report, entitled Emerging Technology Analysis: Solid-State Drives for Enterprise Storage, "Having an ultrafast Tier 0 available as nonvolatile storage is one thing, but having software that can appropriately exploit it is another. Currently, SSDs acting as Tier 0 storage are left mostly to the manipulative arts of the application owner (such as a database administrator who might understand which indexes have the most profound effect on the most-mission-critical database instances). This is a fairly manual and potentially error-prone process. Today there are few tools that easily enable, much less identify and automate, the process of ensuring that the most performance-sensitive or mission-critical data is placed in the new Tier 0."

The Pillar Axiom solves this problem with its patented Quality of Service (QoS) functionality. Being the industry’s only Application-Aware Storage System, the Pillar Axiom allows an administrator to easily prioritize the data. They simply define the application type and its associated value to the business through a simple drop-down menu. The system then automatically tunes itself to deliver differentiated storage service levels based on the business priority of each application. Those storage service levels include determining which drive type (SSD, Fibre Channel or SATA) to write the data.

"When SSD’s are managed and optimized properly it is clear that they provide compelling performance benefits. In order to fully exploit the technology, users need something that will differentiate data type and tier it accordingly," said Joseph Unsworth, Research Director, Gartner. "Vendors need to provide a turnkey SSD solution that automates the data selection process, which ultimately, will allow users to prioritize which information is considered mission critical, and therefore, will reduce overall cost and disk space without compromising performance."

All other storage systems on the market today treat these very different drive types equally, thus negating in large part the benefits of SSDs. By delivering multiple QoS levels within a single system, Pillar Axiom ensures that only the most mission-critical data is placed on SSDs, while lower tiers of data are stored on traditional drive types. Pillar customers are ensured that all of their business data is stored on the most cost-effective and energy-efficient storage medium given the application requirements.

"We initially chose the Pillar Axiom over other storage systems because of its exceptional efficiency and price-performance advantage. Bringing SSD technology into the Axiom should significantly extend that proposition, and provide the ability to maximize performance while slashing energy consumption," said Hilton Reading, vice president of IT and CIO, Skyservice. "We’re excited to see Pillar continue to apply innovative technologies to solving traditional problems."

The Axiom’s SSD Bricks will include 12 drives per storage enclosure, which can deliver performance gains of up to 100X that of traditional Fibre Channel disk drives. Like standard Axiom Bricks, the SSD Bricks will include Pillar’s unique Distributed RAID technology that allows for easy and rapid scalability with no performance degradation. These new Bricks are backed by Pillar’s written utilization and performance guarantees.