Pillar Axiom Selected by Book Publishing Company Burb

Pillar Data Systems, the leading provider of Application-Aware storage systems, announced that Blurb, the creative publishing and marketing platform that enables anyone to design, publish, share and sell bookstore-quality books, selected the Pillar Axiom Storage System to archive hundreds of thousands of pages of text and graphics. Blurb was drawn to the Axiom’s seamless scalability and high efficiency and performance.

Blurb is an on-demand publishing platform that enables anyone to create beautifully bound books using their photos and text, in quantities of one, or many. With nearly 1 million books in its database, and 50-60GB of additional content uploaded every day, Blurb needed a scalable, easy to manage system that allowed rapid expansion without loss of performance or functionality, all while remaining virtually invisible to the customer.
 
With an interactive Web site where customers upload large personal files and up to 250 GB a day during peak periods, any delay in the storage system could be visible to the customer and ultimately affect Blurb’s core business, and in turn, its bottom line.
 
By deploying the Pillar Axiom, Blurb increased its storage utilization to between 84 and 86 percent, the highest utilization rates available in the storage industry. Since industry average utilization rates fall somewhere between 25-40 percent, Blurb is slashing its storage costs by more than 50 percent, a corporate imperative when dealing with such high volumes of data. Additionally, with Pillar’s AxiomONE management interface and guided maintenance functionality, Blurb’s IT team is managing more data in less time than required by traditional storage systems.
 
“At the end of the day, what sold us was that the Axiom was easy to manage,” said Mike Vincenty, IT Manager at Blurb. “The AxiomONE software allows us to manage all of our drives from a single interface, and add capacity without compromising functionality or efficiency. By necessity, we run a lean and efficient IT department, with a focus on simple, robust, and scalable systems. The Pillar Axiom has exceeded our expectations on that front.”
 
Pillar’s AxiomONE is an integrated software suite that allows customers to reduce the complexity and the cost of managing large and varied types of stored information.
 
As Blurb’s database continues to grow and the company brings more I/O-intensive applications into its environment, the Application-Aware Pillar Axiom will allow the company to easily allocate the appropriate levels of Quality of Service (QoS) for each application. Pillar’s patented QoS functionality optimizes storage efficiency and performance, while driving down overall storage costs.
 
“Pillar is extremely excited to be working with an innovative company such as Blurb,” said Bob Maness, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Pillar Data Systems. “Our companies share a similar philosophy of providing greater customer service and value through innovation and a rejection of the status quo. Our CEO, Mike Workman, has published his own Blurb book, Wisdom, Wisecracks, and Weener Dogs. As users of Blurb’s publishing platform, this is exactly the type of strategic partnership we strive for with our customers.”