Pillar Axiom Slammer Series 2 With Cache and Processing Doubled

Pillar Data Systems makes significant advancements to the Axiom 600 storage system with the new Slammer Series 2 deliver the highest performance and highest value to the industry. This new Slammer combined with Pillar’s fourth generation AxiomONE software delivers more flexibility and investment protection with twice the cache and twice the processing power, for a 50% increase in overall performance.

The Slammer Series 2 leverages Pillar’s patented Quality of Service (QoS) capability in the AxiomONE software suite, enabling customers to further differentiate application IO workloads by promoting and/or demoting the QoS of a LUN or filesystem by Slammer and drive type. Because the new Slammer Series 2 works in conjunction with first-generation Slammers, customers can leverage their existing storage pools, ensuring optimal investment protection.

With multiple applications running in the same environment, such as e-mail, databases, back-up and video streaming, customers have more ways to allocate storage resources to each data type for maximum performance and efficiency.

“Users continue to look for ways to balance performance needs with application requirements. They shouldn’t be faced with massive or costly upgrades to their entire system when they embark on a new project or simply have changing priorities,” said Simon Robinson, Storage Research Director, The 451 Group. “Technical advancements like Pillar’s new Slammer give customers more flexibility so they can customize their storage environment to suit their individual business needs at any given time. Because it’s more customized, there’s less waste and greater efficiency.”    

Data Center Demands Rise
The pressure continues to mount for IT managers to consolidate multiple applications on fewer data center infrastructure resources. Yet, business needs have demanded that application performance improve. The new advancements in the Axiom allow customers to protect their investments by being able to choose the optimal configuration based on their business needs, and in turn, the needs of their applications.

The Axiom as a Cloud Platform
Pillar Axiom is an ideal storage platform for cloud environments because of its flexibility, performance, scalability and unique QoS capabilities. Much like Pillar did with its SSD and 2 terabyte SATA drives, the company is again making it possible to extend new product technology into a system without disruption, giving cloud providers new flexibility in deploying and morphing storage to meet diverse user and application requirements.

“It was the Axiom’s ability to easily delineate storage resources to individual applications that compelled us to standardize on it in for our new cloud service,” said Richard Wood, COO, Eagle Business Solutions. “A key challenge for cloud service providers is the ability to ensure that Service Level Agreements are enforced. Because the Axiom takes the guess work out of scaling capacity and the resulting performance, we can guarantee our customers the same level of storage efficiency that Pillar customers demand.”

Slammer Series 2 Product Details
Slammer storage controllers are the high-performance, high-reliability data movers and managers for Pillar Axiom Storage systems. Each Slammer is a high-availability subsystem, providing connectivity between internal storage resources and external application hosts and management interfaces. These components are tightly integrated with Pillar’s AxiomONE software suite, enabling intuitive storage management, configuration and monitoring.

Pillar’s Slammer Series 2 boasts
a 50 percent increase in IOPS as well as:

• Double the cache
• Double the CPU horsepower
• A 4X increase in CIFS connections
• A 2X increase in number of vLUNs
• 30% increase in backend performance
• 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drive Brick support

Today’s news underscores Pillar’s mission to make storage efficiency a reality. Last year, Pillar introduced an SSD-enabled Axiom that continues to deliver the single best $/IOP in the storage market, and drives down overall power consumption by up to 85 percent. Pillar also introduced the first enterprise-class 2TB SATA drive that increases capacity, while consuming less space and energy.

The Axiom 600 Slammer Series 2 started shipping in late 2009, and is now generally available through Pillar and its authorized resellers.