iBridge Builds Storage Foundation With Pillar Axiom

iBridge LLC, a managed IT and data processing services company based in Beaverton, Ore., has deployed the Axiom 600 unified storage system from Pillar Data Systems to support mission-critical information and applications for nearly 100 major customers in the legal, healthcare, manufacturing, government and financial services sectors.

In building out a new data center in nearby Portland, iBridge sought a world-class storage platform that would scale seamlessly while assuring uninterrupted access to vital information. The company wanted a storage partner that understood the managed IT services business model and overarching focus on customer service excellence, dynamic growth, stringent SLAs and ever-increasing compliance demands.

According to iBridge, the Pillar Axiom was selected over competing offerings from EMC, NetApp and BlueArc because it guaranteed unsurpassed capacity utilization, on-the-fly expandability, higher levels of redundancy, simplified management and a two-year ROI.

iBridge reports that Pillar’s Axiom platform will help accommodate its five-year growth projections while decreasing administrative overhead by 70 percent when compared to the effort required to manage legacy EMC storage currently deployed at other iBridge data centers.

Flexibility, Utilization & Scalability

iBridge was impressed with Pillar’s modular, distributed architecture, which features both SAN and NAS configurations in a single platform with a common storage pool using SSD, FC and/or SATA drives.
Pillar’s Quality of Service (QoS) software and application-aware capabilities are ideally suited for dynamic environments as storage resources can be tuned to optimize performance on a per-application basis.
Pillar’s Axiom delivers unparalleled utilization rates and consistent performance increases as iBridge scaled the system. The Pillar Axiom can be expanded to 1.6 PBs of raw capacity to keep pace with continuous data surges, especially as iBridge handles more healthcare digital imaging projects.
High levels of redundancy, including dual active/active controllers and fault tolerant power supplies, also meets iBridge’s strict uptime requirements.
In the future, iBridge is considering standardizing on Pillar as the price-performance and overall storage efficiency of the Axiom surpasses existing EMC systems, which typically cost about 60 percent more than similarly configured Pillar systems.

Desh Urs, managing partner of iBridge LLC, said: "We wanted a responsive partner with innovative technology that could keep up with us. In our industry, you can land a job and need 20 TBs immediately. It’s critical to have a storage partner that understands the managed IT services business model and knows we can’t tell our customers to wait a week before we can accommodate them. With Pillar, we can mix and match media types based on the application, which will become increasingly important as our business expands. In the future, there will be times when we’ll want to keep time-sensitive data on high-speed SSD disk storage while less-critical data can be archived on lower-cost SATA drives. The way Pillar achieves this through its QoS and dynamic storage tiering is excellent. For iBridge, it came down to selecting the most reliable technology with the best value and seamless scalability to support our demanding customers and dynamic environment. Axiom is the right solution, and Pillar is the right partner to help us take our business to the next level."

Mark Prewitt, chief technologist of iBridge LLC, said: "Pillar takes a different approach from everyone else with its all-in-one-solution and innovative technology. It’s clear Pillar is going where storage should be. No one could beat Pillar’s utilization rates. As you add more disks with other platforms, you eventually reach a bottleneck. Not so with Pillar. We achieved performance gains as we scaled the system. Pillar was the only platform we were confident could meet our growth needs over the next five years. EMC typically costs up to 60 percent more than a similarly configured Axiom, which definitely plays in Pillar’s favor. Pillar can help us in many more ways looking ahead."