September 12, 2006

Insurance Run Off operation consolidates storage
~ new SAN system from Pillar Data Systems drives
down total cost of ownership ~

Alea London Ltd, part of the Bermuda-based Alea Group Holdings (Bermuda) Ltd, has chosen the Pillar Axiom™ to handle its storage demands at its London data centre. The new storage system prepares Alea’s run-off insurance and reinsurance operation for a large-scale virtualisation project running on the Pillar Axiom that starts this Autumn.

The Pillar Axiom’s combination of SATA drive technology with the AxiomONE operating system will reduce Alea’s capital expenditure and operational costs significantly over the next three to five years. It will also provide a scalable and flexible platform on which to base Alea’s server virtualisation technology from VMWare.

“The Pillar Axiom will enable us to consolidate core business systems, data warehousing, VTL backup and email archiving on a single storage platform,” said Andrew Boyd, IT Manager, Alea. “Overall the Axiom’s design provides us with a single, long-term economic storage solution that we are confident in managing and maintaining ourselves. Administrative costs are significantly reduced by the management software’s ability to hide the complexity of the system.”

“Alea’s previous approach to storage was not scalable and led to excessive hardware in the data centre. By consolidating data across disparate systems onto a single storage platform the team at Alea has been able to reduce the number of physical servers through virtualisation and the Pillar QoS,” said Andy Jacques, director of sales, Northern Europe, Pillar Data Systems. “When Alea needs additional capacity, or wants to set up new applications, additional hardware can be installed and configured in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.”

The unique architecture of the Axiom has enabled Alea to deploy a storage array with multiple front-end controllers and storage bricks to support a wide variety of applications. Pillar’s AxiomONE storage management software enables Alea to deliver different levels of performance to individual applications from a single cost-effective drive technology.

For more information about the Pillar Axiom visit www.pillardata.com

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Pillar Data Systems
Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops enterprise network storage systems. The company’s Pillar Axiom solution, driven by its innovative policy-based management capabilities, integrates SAN and NAS into a centrally managed storage platform. Pillar Axiom systems consolidate multiple tiers of enterprise network storage into a single, easily managed system capable of scaling to hundreds of terabytes of capacity.
 
Pillar Data Systems is privately funded by Tako Ventures, LLC, the venture arm of Larry Ellison. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with a development office in Longmont, Colorado. The EMEA headquarters is in Drogheda near Dublin, with initial operations across Ireland, UK, Germany and France.

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