Irvine Consulting Services Using Pillar Axiom

Irvine Consulting Services (ICS), an IT outsourcing and managed services provider based in Emeryville, Calif., has standardized on the Axiom unified storage system from Pillar Data Systems to fuel business growth and launch its ICS Cloud Computing Service.

ICS supports hundreds of San Francisco Bay Area companies typically with 25 to 125 computer users across accounting, architecture, biotech, engineering, education, government, healthcare, and legal industries. As such, the company deploys technologies at customer sites and its own data center.

Most recently, ICS introduced a cloud computing service that offers customers an economic value proposition by moving most, if not all, of their infrastructure into ICS’s virtualized, hybrid cloud computing platform.

According to ICS, the Pillar Axiom was selected over competing products from EMC, Dell, Compellent, HP and Nexsan because it delivered twice the performance of other comparably priced platforms, due to capacity utilization and system-wide Quality of Service (QoS).

With Pillar Axiom, ICS is positioned to meet customers’ stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for system uptime while ensuring secure, reliable access to mission-critical data residing onsite or within ICS’s private cloud.

Storage Platform for Managed Services Environments

• ICS was impressed by how intuitive and simple it was to deploy Pillar Axiom; the entire implementation was completed in a couple of hours when it used to take weeks to install a SAN previously.
• According to ICS, the Pillar Axiom is well suited for its managed services business as it matches the agility of the company’s VMware server virtualization solution by providing multi-tenancy and multi-protocol support without performance degradation.
• Pillar’s fault-tolerant design, distributed RAID controllers and built-in hot spares maximize system reliability; Axiom’s scalability also meets customer requirements for on-demand expansion.
• ICS is standardizing on Pillar Axiom for its cloud service as well as other SAN deployments on behalf of its customers. ICS has forecasted a three-year ROI on Pillar Axiom deployments for its customers, including a storage consolidation project, a disaster recovery overhaul and a rapid storage expansion project to handle a biotech customer’s growth.

Dave Irvine, founder and president of Irvine Consulting Services, said:" With Pillar’s Axiom, we could easily control the horsepower of each LUN when it was carved out, which offered increased flexibility and adaptability. When we factored in upgrade costs and annual licensing renewals on other platforms, we could buy a Pillar Axiom with twice the capacity and performance of other storage platforms. I was stupefied by how intuitive and simple the Pillar deployment was. We went from SAN deployments that used to take weeks to the Pillar install, which only took a couple of hours. We give Pillar the ‘seal of approval,’ which provides plenty of credibility as actions speak the loudest when making technology recommendations. Customers really like how Pillar can prioritize I/O to ensure consistent performance for all their applications. Pillar Axiom is ideally suited for managed services providers as it delivers the QoS our customers demand, along with the technology innovation they expect. For us, these capabilities, coupled with ease of deployment and intuitive management, are a winning combination."