French Transportation Company SETAO Acquires Pillar Axiom

SETAO replaced its NetApp NAS system with the Axiom from Pillar Data Systems to achieve better storage efficiency and application performance. Société d’Exploitation du Tramway et du réseau de bus de l’Agglomération d’Orléans (SETAO) manages the urban transportation network of the city of Orléans, France which transports about 100,000 passengers per day. The company trusted Pillar to support its strict reliability and scalability requirements.

“Storage efficiency was a very important factor when we chose the Axiom,” said Olivier Parcollet, IT Director, SETA O. “We would have needed 4,000 Watts with other systems – all with the same capacity. To run the Axiom, we only need 650 Watts of electricity. That’s a very impressive ratio, and one that has already delivered significant cost savings.”

SETAO manages data from trams and buses, vehicle radios, billing systems, electrical systems, traffic lights, and video feeds from surveillance cameras throughout Orléans. In addition to gathering and maintaining this information, the company makes real-time traffic information available via mobile devices and makes surveillance data available for law enforcement. To manage this massive amount of data, the company maintains 15 Oracle databases and other applications on 70 virtual machines.

With Pillar’s Application-Aware capability built on its patented QoS technology, SETAO was able to classify the data from the highest importance to the lowest, effectively allocating resources for maximum storage utilization. “By ensuring certain performance levels, we are able to more accurately warranty a service level agreement to each end user,” said Parcollet.

With the former NetApp storage system, SETAO experienced performance issues due to resource contention, which caused concern about scalability. New drives could not be added. “We would have to stop our existing solution and actually exchange it with the manufacturer to get a system with more capacity,” said Parcollet.

After running tests on NetApp, EMC, and Pillar systems, Parcollet found that an Oracle request ran seven to 10 times faster on the Axiom. And while some of the systems experienced a drastic reduction in performance and reliability when stressed, the Axiom remained stable. The reliability of SETAO’s new system was proven when, just weeks after the deployment, there was an interruption of electricity. The Pillar Axiom remained stable with no downtime.

“When companies like SETAO have hundreds of thousands of people depending on them just to get through their day, they can’t afford any downtime, no matter how short,” said Bob Maness, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “That’s when they realize they need a storage partner that practices the same philosophy. Combined with its competitive IOPS per terabyte and lower energy requirements, the Axiom improves application performance simply by using storage more efficiently.”

Recently SETAO embarked on a new project to store and manage video from the municipal surveillance cameras – initially 300 video cameras but soon to be expanded to 500. With this huge amount of data and a requirement to retain it for at least 14 days, the company ordered an additional 50TB of capacity to add to its Pillar Axiom. The ease of capacity scaling was a key benefit to SETAO.