Application-Aware Storage
Yesterday’s storage picture
The evolution of server technology has led to fast servers and high utilisation rates. Yet the evolution of storage has been stagnant. Yesterdays’ storage is in data centres today: simple LUNs with tuning capabilities limited to cache and interfaces. These limitations create a load imbalance of application I/O requirements, resulting in average utilisation rates of around 40%. Add server virtualisation to the picture, and you have servers running multiple applications with partitioned resources pumping more I/O to the storage systems-causing much more strain on a storage system than the same amount of non-virtualised servers.
For storage systems to keep pace with their server counterparts, they must be able to differentiate services based upon application workload as defined by best practices and administrative settings.
The storage picture of today—and tomorrow
Pillar Data Systems is the first vendor in the storage industry to provide an application-aware storage system. With the Pillar Axiom, performance is dynamically adjusted for those applications which require it, and your storage utilisation is greatly increased due to the ability to more reliably predict performance. Now administrators can predict their utilisation and be comfortable that the storage will not be over provisioned.
Even with this added functionality, the Pillar Axiom 500 application-aware storage system drives down acquisition and operating costs by allowing you to:
- Buy less storage. If you could use 40 to 80% more of your storage system, then that’s fewer systems that you have to buy. The Axiom allows you to get differentiated services from multiple LUNs striped across high-capacity spindles, which means the best of both worlds: high performance and high utilisation. And when your company growth means you need more storage—you can scale the Axiom to over 800TB of raw capacity.
- Provision your storage like you provision your servers. Management and maintenance tasks are much easier when you can provision LUNs by application, like you provision your virtualised servers. No more complex forecasting. No more array read/write cache rebalancing to match changes in application workload.
- Rely on dynamic provisioning of resources. Storage silos are a thing of the past. Storage arrays shouldn’t be disposable devices bought for a project and then scrapped at completion or, worse yet, left serving data which is essentially no longer accessed or needed. Once a project is completed, the Axiom dynamically reassigns priority and a new project can be started on the same array. You can even set up a policy to automatically increase the priority of specific applications temporarily as it is needed.
- Dump the dinosaurs and consolidate. How many old-style storage systems are using up power, space, and management resources in your data centre? The Axiom can handle multiple disk types and protocols and can provide varying performance levels to your data and applications. With utilisation rates as high as 80%, you can consolidate your existing storage on an Axiom.
The storage-of-choice in your data centre
Its unique application-aware features, low acquisition and operating costs, unparalleled high utilisation rate, and ability to scale to over 800TB of raw capacity all combine to make Axiom much, much more than a mere LUN. Whether as the consolidated pooled storage array in your virtualised data centre, your main storage in your mission-critical system, or the trusted storage as a key to your business continuance processes – the Pillar’s application-aware Axiom 500 is fast becoming the storage of choice in today’s data centre. |
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