Features

MC Means Mission Critical

The Application-Aware Pillar Axiom 500MC and Axiom 600MC were designed for customers requiring the attributes of Web 2.0 class computing in flexibility, scalability and ease of management as well as absolute reliability and continuous uptime for their mission-critical applications, but for whom legacy high-end arrays are too complex and costly.

The Pillar Axiom 500MC and PillarAxiom 600MC are comprised of a mirrored and replicated system pair with modular and highly redundant hardware components. Combined with complimentary AxiomONE local protection software and inherent replication technology, the Pillar Axiom 500-MC neutralises threats to data availability. The mirrored Axiom environment provides continuous uptime and protects against planned and non-planned downtime events that may occur.

Finally, this mission-critical solution is maintained, optimised, and serviced by Pillar Professional Services to meet the high availability needs of any mission-critical production environment. In fact, that�s guaranteed: The Pillar Axiom 500/600MC is guaranteed to provide a minimum uptime of 99.999% and 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.

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.

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.

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.

True Flexibility and Modular Scalability

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.

And with the massive scalability of performance and capacity offered by the Pillar Axiom, your system will give you up to 1.6 petabytes of raw capacity while maintaining multi-tenancy capability, and the new capacity will be automatically integrated into the storage pool.

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.

The Ultimate in Oracle Support

Oracle Database together with Axiom storage deliver high performance while providing an easy management environment. The Pillar Axiom 600MC 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.

Best of Breed Replication

The Axiom 500MC and 600MC are built with highly redundant hardware components. Combined with AxiomONE local protection software (volume copies, clones) and inherent replication technology, the they neutralize logical, physical, and site-level threats to data availability.

A second Axiom system may be provisioned at a disaster recovery site as a replication target for the main site. In the event of a disaster at the primary site, the recovery site allows data service to continue.

The mirrored Axiom environment provides continuous uptime and protects against planned and non-planned downtime events that may occur.

Support and Services: Ongoing, Onsite and Always On-Call

Pillar reduces the anxiety and eliminates the guesswork by combining proven Professional Services and Customer Support offerings into a cohesive and affordable service offering that’s bundled in the Axiom 500MC and Axiom 600MC.

The importance of your mission-critical data to your business demands the proactive and undivided attention of your storage vendor – and Pillar is answering the call.

Pillar provides extended customer support for the first three years that your system is in production, as an integral component of the Pillar Axiom 500MC and Axiom 600MC Storage Solution. It is maintained, provisioned and optimized by Pillar’s Professional Services organization.

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.

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.

Learn why the Pillar Axiom is the storage system of choice in the data centre today and tomorrow. Read brochures, case studies, and other information about the Pillar Axiom 500MC and Pillar Axiom 600MC.

Our Guarantee

The Pillar Axiom 500/600MC is guaranteed to provide a minimum uptime of 99.999% and 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 500MC & Pillar Axiom 600MC