Pillar Chosen by Buffini & Company

Buffini & Company, the largest real estate coaching and training company in North America, has deployed the Pillar Data Systems‘ Axiom unified storage system to keep pace with rapid storage growth while ensuring high level of data availability.

Thousands of real estate, lending and service industry professionals in more than 37 countries rely on Buffini & Company’s training programs, including web-based tools, videos, webinars and live broadcasts, to build their businesses and increase net profits.

As Buffini & Company’s data storage requirements began doubling annually, the IT team experienced severe capacity problems with its existing direct-attached storage (DAS) solution and also encountered performance problems with its Microsoft Exchange environment. The team also grew concerned about the company’s ability to support the storage requirements of 40 Microsoft Windows servers, six virtual servers running VMware ESX Server, as well as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and Great Plains software.

According to Buffini & Company, Pillar Data Systems’ system-wide Quality of Service ensured higher performance levels and greater flexibility to prioritize storage based on business demands, such as month-end billing, as well as faster ROI than competing platforms from EMC, Compellent and EqualLogic.

Pillar Delivers Scalable, ‘Five Nines’ Performance
With Pillar, Buffini & Company has grown its storage capacity incrementally, starting with two SATA and two Fibre Channel Axiom Brick storage enclosures with 28 TBs of capacity. The company has since scaled seamlessly to more than 40 TBs of storage capacity while achieving a 10 times performance increase for Microsoft Exchange.

According to the company, Pillar’s overall architecture and fault tolerance features make a platform for meeting its ever-increasing archive storage requirements while ensuring ‘five nines’ availability in keeping with customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Buffini & Company also takes advantage of its Pillar SAN to replicate SQL backups to a non-Pillar device to accelerate disk-based recoveries, which also has elevated customer service.

In comparing its Pillar SAN to the previous storage environment, the company ascertains that it would have cost twice as much to scale with DAS, which led to the expectation that Pillar will produce a much faster break-even point.

Rodney Butler, network systems manager for Buffini & Company, said:
"With Pillar, we can create a profile to give a certain application priority and then change it on-the-fly, which would be really helpful in dealing with month-end billing. This enables us to control our own destiny instead of hoping the SAN would do it for us, which was the case with Compellent.
"Installation and training were done in a day, which was much quicker than I expected. And, creating LUNs is super easy and takes about two minutes. Setting QoS profiles are equally straightforward and I’ve hardly ever had to call in to configure anything.
"Pillar’s support monitoring gets high marks. Before I even knew a drive had gone bad, Pillar’s remote monitoring had picked up the problem and a replacement drive was shipped to me over the weekend. Pillar does such a good job of overseeing performance that I hardly spend any time managing the device."
"Taking advantage of replicated backups on the Pillar is just another example of how this flexible and reliable technology helps us provide both our employees and hosted customers the best possible service."