Pillar Data Launches New Axiom 600

Pillar Data Systems introduced the Axiom 600 and Pillar Axiom 600MC (Mission Critical), with new application profiles, industry-leading utilization, performance, and per system availability rates.

Pillar Axiom 600 pushes the boundaries of next generation Application-Aware storage, by delivering, and in an industry first, guaranteeing:

• 80-percent disk utilization: the highest in the industry and double the industry average;
• The single best $/IOP in the industry and the ability to scale performance without utilization degradation;
• 99.999 percent availability, or less than five minutes of downtime per year, per system; and
• Additional Application-Aware Storage Profiles to meet the changing demands of the data center today and for the future.

The Axiom 600 extends Pillar’s legacy of innovation, including Quality of Service (QoS), native NAS and SAN, distributed RAID, Guided Maintenance, and leading storage efficiency.

“Since its inception, Pillar has been at the leading edge of technology. With the latest release of the Axiom 600 and the Axiom 600MC, Pillar again demonstrates this technology leadership and ability to drive change in the storage industry,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “Pillar continues to push the envelope by guaranteeing availability, performance and utilization of their Pillar Axiom 600. And along with the application profiles for select applications that allow IT to utilize the storage array to the fullest, Pillar is advancing the state-of-the art.”

Pillar Axiom 600 continues the company’s leadership in Application-Aware storage by bringing additional application profiles into the Axiom Pilot management framework. Pillar Axiom has added new profiles for VMware, multiple Oracle applications, VTL deployments, Microsoft Exchange, SQL, as well as a host of others. These pre-configured and user-customizable profiles allow the user to optimize their Pillar Axiom systems for specific applications simply by selecting the appropriate profiles from a pull down menu in the management GUI.

The Pillar Axiom 600 easily and cost-effectively optimizes storage for applications running in any virtualized server (VM) environment. The Axiom 600 has the ability to dynamically assign or re-assign priorities to applications the business deems most important to improve overall storage performance, while reducing the I/O bottleneck seen in legacy storage systems. Because the Axiom 600 is tuned to work effectively in virtualized environments, it can support 50 percent more virtual machines than competitive products.

“Making your storage optimize for your application seems obvious, but it isn’t the way it happens. Mostly, its one size fits all – take it or leave it. I really like the idea of storage that changes to fit the application environment and the fact that Pillar is willing to guarantee it speaks volumes,” said Steve Duplessie, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

Pillar Axiom further distinguishes itself as an optimal storage platform for Oracle applications. Oracle Databases running Automatic Storage Management and Pillar Axiom storage deliver high performance, while providing an easy-to-use management environment. The Pillar Axiom/Oracle Automatic Storage  Management integration with Oracle Database 10g takes the guesswork out of database tuning, simplifies storage management, and delivers optimal database I/O performance automatically.

Pillar now provides Oracle write operations to occur in 1MB ‘wide stripes’ – the largest in the industry – resulting in higher throughput between Pillar storage and requesting applications running in Oracle environments. No other storage system on the market today offers this functionality for Oracle databases and applications.

“With this new capability, Pillar Axiom can integrate with Oracle’s ASM, as well as write data in 1MB stripes, the exact way our applications prefer it,” said Mark Salser, senior vice president, Oracle. “Pillar’s 1MB striping with ASM in a RAID 5 configuration is a significant development and should help drive down the cost and complexity of customer solutions.  Pillar has always integrated well with Oracle, and today’s announcement is another proof point to how well the companies work together.”

Already customers have recognized the benefits of the Axiom 600 storage system. One such company, Foundry Networks, a leading provider of high-performance enterprise and service provider switching, routing, security, and application traffic management solutions, expects to see phenomenal results from the next generation Axiom.

“We are excited about the new Pillar Axiom 600,” said David Riley, CIO of Foundry Networks. “Foundry saw early on that the Axiom platform can deliver efficiencies like no other storage system on the market today, and drive higher application performance and uptime. Pillar has once again raised the bar compared to other storage systems on the market.”

The Pillar Axiom 600 is a next generation storage system ideally suited to complement the next generation data center. As the world’s data centers continue to evolve, the value proposition and market differentiation of the Axiom platform grows exponentially.

“Storage systems must address the fast expanding and increasingly diverse storage needs of datacenters by delivering greater efficiency, more scalability, higher utilization rates, and more sophisticated data management capabilities that work seamlessly with business applications,” said Richard Villars, Vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC. “With solutions like Pillar’s Axiom 600 that focus on delivering more powerful, flexible, and intelligent storage systems, datacenter executives will be in a better position to respond to their organization’s evolving application requirements.”

The Axiom 600 and the Axiom 600MC are currently available worldwide, through both Pillar and authorized channel partners.
“With the Axiom 600 and 600MC, Pillar is now competing at a whole new level, allowing us to gain a greater foothold in the enterprise market where we’ve had success against our more entrenched competitors,” said Mike Workman, chairman and CEO, Pillar Data Systems. “By deploying Pillar Axiom, customers can now derive maximum performance, functionality and industry leading utilization rates – and we’re the only ones in the industry to guarantee it.”