New Features for Pillar’s Axiom

Pillar Data Systems delivered several new features that increase the performance, efficiency and ease of management for its Pillar Axiom storage system. These new additions build on the Axiom’s unique Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities and ensure greater flexibility and reliability for storage administrators.

Business has demanded greater resilience to outages and enhanced data protection for Disaster Recovery with limited budgets. Pressure to consolidate multiple applications on fewer infrastructure resources and provide better SLAs add to those demands. Since 2001, Pillar has been the only company to offer a truly unified storage platform that can deliver multiple tiers of storage for SAN, NAS and iSCSI all from a single footprint.

New Product Features

• AxiomONE Replication: Native array-based data protection for both SAN and NAS for the Pillar Axiom product platform. Pillar’s AxiomONE Replication extends its current replication offerings with easy to use policy-based Application-Aware profiles to give more choice for data protection for customers of all sizes.
• QoS within Storage Class: Each storage media type (FC, SSD, SATA) can now have all QoS priority bands operational within a respective class for more granular use of Pillar’s patented QoS. The QoS adjusts priority, CPU, cache and network resources – all extremely effective even with SSD in a storage pool. While statistical short stroking is one of the tools used to optimize SATA performance, it is only one tool used by the Axiom to extract every drop of performance from the capacity pool.
• AxiomONE Pre-emptive Copy: New adaptive learning RAS feature senses ‘suspect’ drives in the storage pool and copies data to a spare drive before calling for a replacement. The Pre-emptive Copy feature further shortens Pillar’s industry-leading drive rebuild times by doing the bulk of the work before a failure occurs, using a simple copy instead of a rebuild of the drive contents.
• Application-Aware QoS Migration: Gives the administrator the ability to balance performance and cost by choosing the correct storage configuration and priority for varying business needs; as opposed to Automated Tiering which takes that control away from the administrators.

TERIS is a full-service litigation support solution provider, providing law firms and corporate legal departments sophisticated consultation-based solutions, state-of-the-art technologies and highly experienced project management. To support this highly sensitive information TERIS has been using Pillar’s Axiom 600 NAS Platform for the past two years. TERIS is an early adopter of Pillar’s homogeneous AxiomONE Replication to provide Disaster Recovery for its critical data. This addresses a critical component in TERIS’ Business Continuity plan.  

“Protecting the integrity of our data and the data or our clients is key to the success of our business,” said Mark Prewitt, Director of IT, TERIS. “That’s why we’ve deployed Pillar’s AxiomONE Replication to help ensure that our data is always available and protected. The Pillar solution gives us peace of mind, increased efficiency and overall cost savings.”

"Our research is showing an increased user interest in storage system vendors focused on solutions that offer greater efficiencies and tight integration with business applications," said Roger Cox, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. "As data continues to grow at a significant rate, those companies that focus on application integration and greater customer value  versus enhancing basic functionality will continue to be of interest for users looking to maximize ROI in their storage investments.”

“It’s only fitting that we should be celebrating the Axiom’s five-year anniversary with more innovation. Storage administrators should be rewarded for exercising their creative genius to do more with less. Our news today gives them the tools to do more with performance, capacity and efficiency without making any compromises,” said Mike Workman, Chairman and CEO, Pillar Data Systems. “With these new technology developments, we’re also celebrating our customers by protecting and expanding their investments in Pillar and the Axiom.”