Pillar in App-Aware Thin Provisioning

Pillar Data Systems announced Application-Aware Thin Provisioning
and new advanced technologies to extend its leadership in simplifying
storage management and driving higher performance and utilization
service levels on its Pillar Axiom platform. As an integral feature in
Pillar’s new software release, Thin Provisioning further extends the
Axiom’s unrivaled storage efficiency, ease of management, and unique,
cost-effective scalable architecture.

“Pillar
has delivered twice the utilization rates, twice the savings and twice
the overall efficiency of competitive storage systems,” said Nancy
Holleran, President and COO, Pillar Data Systems. “Today’s announcement
continues Pillar’s rejection of the status quo. We believe a storage
system should work with your key applications, not against them. All
applications are not created equal. Shouldn’t your storage system be
aware of that?”

Thin Provisioning,
combined with Pillar’s Application-Aware set of features such as
quality of service (QoS), unique distributed controller and RAID
architecture delivers unprecedented disk utilization rates, while
providing optimal performance and availability storage services to
applications. Additionally, Pillar is the only storage vendor to offer
Thin Provisioning in a multi-tenancy (SAN, NAS, iSCSI) solution,
providing differentiated storage service levels aligned to application
priorities – all in a single, scalable storage system.

As
the world’s first and only true Application-Aware Storage platform, the
Pillar Axiom marries storage infrastructure to applications running in
virtual and physical server environments through customizable
application profiles. Using these profiles, the Pillar Axiom allows
administrators to automate storage provisioning aligned to application
priority. A simple management interface reduces complexity and
administrative time. Pillar’s unique architecture consolidates storage
in a single, multi-tenancy scalable platform to lower capital and
operating expense while increasing productivity and efficiency.

Pillar
is also making available advanced Clone and Snapshot features (CloneFS
and CloneLUN) to quickly and simply build storage infrastructures,
enabling easy recovery point validation and new applications into
production quicker.

Pillar’s CloneFS/LUN
is a writeable block snapshot with no impact to cache or system
performance. Unlike competitive offerings, Pillar’s file system
snapshots are preserved in the cloning process, and allow the
administrator to quickly and easily create copies of volumes for
secondary use such as backup, test or development – without consuming
array resources.

Today’s announcement
also includes a new innovative feature to efficiently lay out data in
the Pillar Axiom – Pooled RAID10. These technologies can double
performance while eliminating the large performance degradation seen by
competing storage systems during disk drive rebuilds.

Pillar’s Pooled RAID10 maximizes
performance for random, write-intensive applications. OLTP-type
applications and Microsoft Exchange, for example, run up to 50 percent
faster in write throughput traffic using Pooled RAID 10 when compared
to RAID5 configurations. Pillar’s Pooled RAID10 is the only RAID
implementation that can be set on a LUN by LUN basis and does not
require that an entire drive be either RAID5 or RAID10.

Thin provisioning, CloneFS, Clone LUN, and Pooled RAID10 from Pillar
Data Systems are available now to Beta program customers. These
features will be generally available March 14, 2008.

Pillar Data Systems