Simpson Strong-Tie Standardizes on Two Pillar Axiom

Simpson Strong-Tie, a company that manufactures framing products that contribute to the strength and safety of homes and other structures, decided to revamp its entire storage system and standardize on the Pillar Axiom from Pillar Data Systems. The move put the company on track to achieve its goal to reach a 60 percent utilization rate – a 30 percent increase from its prior HP systems.


 
The prior system was yielding only 42 percent utilization rate and was still overloaded, hampering application performance. By increasing its storage utilization, Simpson Strong-Tie lowered its overall storage costs by 38 percent and saved $50,000 per year in support services due to Pillar’s ease of use and simple management features.
 
This improved utilization, along with reliability and high-performance, is critical for Simpson Strong-Tie which depends on its always-on business. From production, shipping and field sales access to ERP, order entry and customer support, all of the Simpson Strong-Tie key business assets were traditionally housed on a direct-attached storage system with nearly 2,000 employees using thin-client systems to access the information. However, as business expanded across the company’s 35 worldwide locations, the IT system struggled to keep up with increasing demands, which posed a significant threat to its need for a real-time environment.
 
“When I heard about the Pillar Axiom and its 1TB SATA drives, I couldn’t believe it,” said Eugene Alfaro, Global IT Operations Manager, Simpson Strong-Tie. “With all the storage in a single system, we don’t have to determine which drives go where. We just snap them in and Pillar’s QoS lets us prioritize our data for the project at hand. The flexibility to inject that type of intelligence into the system allows us to focus on other things while our applications hum along.”
 
After a rigorous evaluation of industry solutions – including those offered by Pillar Data, NetApp and EMC – Simpson Strong-Tie selected the Pillar Axiom because of its performance, reliability and Quality of Service (QoS) features. Pillar’s patented storage QoS is the basis for its Application-Aware capability that allows administrators to classify data based on business priority. During the product evaluation, the Axiom was able to manage high-priority data (databases and Exchange) vs. low- and medium-priority (archive and file systems) all on the same system. Because the lower priority data doesn’t compete with or steal storage resources from high-priority data, Simpson Strong-Tie was able to increase its utilization rates while also improving application performance.
 
“It’s not just about capacity. It’s how you balance performance and the way you use that capacity. When customers can improve application performance while lowering costs, they achieve true business efficiency,” said Bob Maness, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “That’s the philosophy behind Pillar’s Application-Aware. And that is precisely why customers like Simpson Strong-Tie are able to see an immediate impact on their bottom line after they deploy the Axiom.”
 
The company purchased two Pillar Axiom systems for its principal data center in Pleasanton, Calif., and a disaster recovery center in McKinney, Tex., each with 20TB of capacity. The IT team also manages an extensive archive of engineering data and drawings for all products going back to the 1960s, as well as file systems and network shares. With the Axiom now deployed, Alfaro’s team is looking forward to shoring up its business-continuity strategy.