Swiss Financial Services Provider PostFinance Chooses Pillar

Pillar Data Systems announced that PostFinance, part of Swiss Post, selected the Pillar Axiom Storage System to provide its Quality of Service tiering capabilities for increased efficiency and overall cost savings.

By providing multiple tiers of storage on a single disk, PostFinance can give priority to important financial transaction processing, while less crucial data, such as archives and backups, can co-exist without impacting overall performance.

PostFinance was founded in 1906 to create Switzerland’s first nationwide payments system. Prior to adopting Pillar, PostFinance had a single-tier system that provided Tier-1 storage for the entire storage pool—even archive and backup data. As its customer base and product and service offerings continued to grow, the company was forced to expand its data center to keep up with storage demands. It soon became clear that an economical, scalable system was imperative to its continued growth.

“We needed to create a scalable infrastructure that would accommodate our growing data demands,” said Jochen Schneider, Chief Information Officer at PostFinance.

Pillar’s patented Quality of Service functionality ensures that mission critical data and applications secure the highest levels of performance and response times, while lower tier data receives appropriate service levels. This delivers leading utilization rates, while still maintaining necessary performance levels for a variety of application and data types.

PostFinance maintains 380 servers and 400TB of storage spread over 4 Axiom Slammers and 60 Axiom Bricks. Maintaining that much data can be costly with competitive systems, but with Pillar’s guaranteed 80 percent utilization and the Axiom’s overall efficiency, PostFinance anticipates big annual savings.

“PostFinance is a text book example of a successful organization that required a simple solution to handle their explosive data growth needs,” said Bob Maness, Vice President Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “We offered a very attractive, vastly simplified and infinitely more scalable solution than competitive offerings. And with the Axiom, the PostFinance team is driving top efficiencies out of their data storage resources.”

Pillar Axiom systems simplify storage, increase utilization rates and seamlessly scale without impacting performance. Additionally, all tiers of data reside on a single platform with a single management interface under a single software license, providing IT managers the ability to manage all data tiers from one centralized location. This also makes the Axiom ideal for enterprises with large-scale data centers that require high-performance characteristics to run their financial applications, online transactions and all applications where performance is imperative, and budget is limited.