Features

The Pillar Axiom 500 and Axiom 600 are the storage industry's only application-aware storage systems, allowing you to increase performance for your applications without sacrificing storage utilisation. Read more about why it's good to be Application-Aware.

The Axiom delivers differentiated services from multiple LUNs striped across high-capacity spindles to gain high performance and high utilisation, enabling you to consolidate your applications on a single storage platform. The Axiom 600 doubles this capability, giving you even greater performance and utilisation. The Axiom 600 is an ideal storage platform for virtual infrastructure projects, IT data centre consolidation projects, Oracle deployments, and bringing applications online with the highest levels of performance without tradeoffs for capacity utilisation.

In fact, that’s guaranteed: The Pillar Axiom 500/600 is guaranteed to provide an agreed-upon minimum utilization and performance service level for a full year. If any reconfiguration or other service work is needed to bring your system to this level, then this service will be provided free of charge.

Thin Provisioning for High Utilisation and Consistent Performance

Preparation for future need shouldn’t mean reducing your capacity today. Allocate storage based on future need without “claiming” that space and making it unavailable and unused. This reduces the amount of physical disk necessary to support a given application.

Thin provisioning is recognised in the industry as a critical approach to simplifying storage management while drastically improving storage capacity utilisation. In fact, Pillar’s Thin Provisioning along with QoS and distributed RAID delivers industry-leading utilisation rates (above 80% today) and will drive utilisation even higher for thinly provisioned LUNS while maintaining consistent performance. No other thin provisioning vendor can consolidate multiple applications in a single array with a dynamic quality of service assigned to each virtual volume. Read more about thin provisioning.

Profiles for Self-Tuning Storage

Pillar has characterised the I/O of today’s popular applications such as Oracle Database, Microsoft Exchange, VTL, VMware, Streaming Media, and more.

These configuration parameters have been saved as open source Axiom Profiles, and are available to you in a simple drop-down menu in your Axiom’s Storage Management Tool user interface. Choose a profile from the menu and the Axiom will literally tune itself.

And the profiles are portable! Start with one of our standard profiles and customize it to meet your particular needs, then export it to share with other lines of business within your company. Simply click the Import Profile button to load the portable profile into your system.
 
Using Pillar’s portable, open source profiles to tune and provision your storage system means faster deployment and tuning replication, and can save you tens of thousands of dollars on professional consulting costs.

Simpler Storage Consolidation

In the past, storage buyers had to choose between the performance of SAN storage systems and the cost-effectiveness of NAS. Pillar eliminates this tradeoff by seamlessly accommodating both SAN and NAS, giving both complete access to a shared storage pool. With Pillar's modular system, you can:.

• Deploy a NAS-only system
• Deploy a SAN-only system
• Combine native SAN and NAS on one platform

Pooled RAID 10

Given its ability to spread a LUN across multiple RAID controllers, the Pillar Axiom’s implementation of distributed RAID 10 delivers industry-leading performance for applications that need higher write throughput performance. Customers with OLTP applications can expect as much as 50% improvement in write throughput traffic compared to RAID 5 configurations.

The ability to share disks for both RAID 5 and RAID 10 LUNs allows RAID 10 performance and reliability, without the capacity overhead of typical RAID 10 approaches.

Modular Scalability

The Pillar Axiom 500 and Axiom 600 offers massive scalability of performance and capacity by adding RAID controllers with every disk shelf, up to 128 controllers and by adding two storage controllers with every one of our Slammers – all in a single configuration. You can grow a single Axiom to 832TB of raw capacity while maintaining multi-tenancy capability, and the new capacity will be automatically integrated into the storage pool.

Now you have the option to increase the speed of your array independent of capacity—which means increasing your capacity without reducing your performance. Capacity scaling independent from performance scaling is another reason that Pillar leads the way in the storage industry. And this also means where you might have needed four storage systems, the Axiom can do it all with one.

True Flexibility

Only the Pillar Axiom delivers the flexibility to change the characteristics of your storage environment at will – without disruption or difficult migrations. Fibre channel, SATA, RAID – SAN (fibre channel and iSCSI), NAS. Change connectivity, increase capacity, and improve performance as desired by purchasing only the components you need. Consolidation is easy in the truly heterogeneous Pillar Axiom.

The Ultimate in Oracle Support

Oracle Database together with Axiom storage deliver high performance while providing an easy management environment. The Pillar Axiom 600 gives even greater Oracle support as it writes in 1MB stripes, the largest in the industry. The 1MB stripe profile allows the Axiom to perform optimally with Oracle’s Automatic Storage Manager, which also writes in 1MB stripes.

Multiple Tiers, One Platform

In the Pillar Axiom system, all tiers of data reside on a single platform, with a single management interface, under a single software license.

Premium — highest performance and availability (available when using Fibre Channel drives)

Tier 1 — high performance and availability levels for mission-critical applications

Tier 2 — increased performance and high availability for mid-performance applications

Tier 3 — adequate performance and availability to support business-utility applications such as file sharing

Archive — cost-effective archive with compliance option

Tiered Storage at the Disk Level

The Application-Aware Axiom configures performance for premium, high, medium, low, and archive priorities, automatically applying resources in the system to fit individual application needs and maximise asset utilisation.

Data is laid out by its performance priority. High-priority data is written to a narrow band on the outermost tracks for increased performance and optimised seek times, while data with lower performance requirements is laid out on the inner tracks.

The Power of Pillar AxiomONE™ Software

AxiomONE is a suite of software that provides you with an easy way to manage and configure all aspects of your Axiom system. From

Simplify. Utilise. Scale.
Pillar Axiom systems are designed from the ground up to simplify your storage, to increase utilisation, and to be easy to seamlessly scale without impacting performance.

• Cut administrative time in half with simplified storage management including six-click setup, automated tuning, application-awareness, near-instant configuration with reusable “profiles,” and guided maintenance.
  
  
• Increase utilisation by up to 80% or more with consolidation of multiple drive technologies, elimination of storage silos, single-array tiering and QoS, and thin provisioning.
  
  
• Lower TCO by 50% with unprecedented flexibility, scalability, reduced management overhead, increased power efficiency, and drastically increased utilisation rates.

Our Guarantee

The Pillar Axiom 500/600 is guaranteed to provide an agreed-upon minimum utilisation and performance service level for a full year.

If any reconfiguration or other service work is needed to bring your system to this level, then this service will be provided free of charge.

Request more information on the Pillar Axiom 500 & 600