News

posted on 21 February 2008 13:36

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Pillar Data has introduced thin provisioning to its Axiom arrays as well as adding new snapshot and clone features to enhance data protection.

With thin provisioning an application has its total storage notionally allocated to it but only the actual capacity needed for writing data plus a small surplus is actually supplied, thus saving on disk storage purchases and driving up disk utilisation.

Pillar says its Axiom product is the only application-aware Storage platform and marries storage infrastructure to applications running in virtual and physical server environments through customizable application profiles. Using these profiles administrators can automate storage provisioning aligned to application priority.

Nancy Holleran, Pillar's president and COO, was enthusiastic about the addition of thin provisioning, saying: “Pillar has delivered twice the utilization rates, twice the savings and twice the overall efficiency of competitive storage 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?”

Hard not to answer yes to that. However Pillar is not the first to offer thin provisioning with 3PAR, HDS and NetApp already offering the feature.

Pillar claims it is the only storage vendor to offer thin provisioning in a multi-tenancy (SAN, NAS, iSCSI) way, providing differentiated storage service levels aligned to application priorities – all in a single, scalable storage system.

Customer Rod Luck, IT VP for Cache Creek Casino Resort, said: “We selected Pillar over other storage vendors because of the Axiom’s unique ability to answer the varying requirements of the multiple applications that run our business from a single platform. With Pillar, we can utilize more of what we purchase than with any other storage vendor. Adding Thin Provisioning to the Pillar Axiom only increases the value it brings to our business.”

Pillar is also making available new 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.

CloneFS/LUN is a writeable block snapshot with no impact on cache or system performance. Pillar says that, unlike competitive offerings, its 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.

Pooled RAID10
Pillar has also introduced a new feature to lay out data more efficiently in the Pillar Axiom - Pooled RAID10. This can double performance while eliminating the large performance degradation sometimes seen by competing storage systems during disk drive rebuilds.

It 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.