Caltrol Drives Down Storage TCO With Pillar

Employee-owned Caltrol selected the Axiom from Pillar Data Systems as its storage platform to significantly lower storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase application performance.

Caltrol recently completed a major virtualization project, which resulted in a 60 percent decrease in storage infrastructure expenditures and a 20 percent reduction in data center power consumption. Caltrol also significantly increased application performance with the Application Aware capabilities of the Pillar Axiom.

The IT department at Caltrol, a process management and automation company, serves the needs of the company’s eight offices, handling all customer orders, purchase orders, enterprise resource planning (ERP), Microsoft Exchange and file-sharing systems. When the company was forced to replace a key server in its legacy infrastructure after it failed, Caltrol lost 30 days of data with no way to restore it and forced employees to re-enter purchase orders to recreate the data. The total loss amounted to about $1 million. With the goal of implementing a robust disaster recovery system, the company looked at HP’s LeftHand systems as well as solutions from Dell, NetApp and Pillar Data Systems.

“We didn’t have an endless budget for a storage system, so we thought we were going to have to make some trade-offs,” said Steve Murphy, IT Director for Caltrol. “We never expected to achieve the easy scalability we have now, and we were blown away by the high level of performance that the Axiom delivered.”

An unexpected benefit for Caltrol was the ‘set it and forget’ management capabilities of Pillar’s AxiomONE software, which was ideal for the four-person IT department. The intuitive management interface makes it easy for users to guarantee a minimum level of application performance and allow multiple tiers of data and applications to be stored on a single system with no performance degradation.

“With the Axiom’s built-in QoS functionality, we could control the system with as much or as little detail as we needed. The other products we evaluated couldn’t do that,” said Murphy. “The time savings are worth almost more than the tens of thousands of dollars we saved on hardware costs. We’ve also dramatically reduced the time our staff is required to spend on managing our storage software system, allowing us to concentrate on expanding our business, and that’s far more than we had ever hoped to accomplish at this stage.”

Based on the successful return on investment and ease of use of the Axiom, Caltrol is now evaluating a paperless initiative. “Common feedback from customers is that they didn’t expect the ease of management and scalability inherent in the Axiom,” said Bob Maness, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “Combine that with the stellar application and database performance and you get a company like Caltrol who can now embark on new business endeavors because they’ve just freed up valuable time and resources.”

The Pillar Axiom’s Application Aware storage differentiates performance based on application priority and can dramatically reduce floor space, energy demands and storage TCO.