February 20 2008

Pillar Data Systems announces Application-Aware Thin Provisioning, extends storage efficiency leadership

new software provides advanced cloning, snapshot, and pooled RAID10 features

Pillar Data Systems, the leading provider of Application-Aware Storage systems,has announced Application-Aware Thin Provisioning and new advanced technologies. The move will extend its leadership in simplifying storage management and driving higher performance and utilisation service levels on its Pillar Axiom platform.

As an integral feature in Pillar's new software release, Thin Provisioning further extends the Axiom's unrivaled storage efficiency, ease of management, and unique,cost-effective scalable architecture.

"Pillar has delivered twice the utilisation rates, twice the savings and twice the overall efficiency of competitive storage systems," said Nancy Holleran, President and COO, Pillar Data Systems. "This 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?"

Thin Provisioning, combined with Pillar's Application-Aware set of features such as quality of service (QoS), unique distributed controller and RAID architecture, delivers unprecedented disk utilisation rates. Thin Provisioning also provides optimal performance and availability storage services to applications. Additionally, Pillar is the only storage vendor to offer Thin Provisioning in a multi-tenancy (SAN, NAS, iSCSI) solution, providing differentiated storage service levels aligned to application priorities - all in a single, scalable storage system.

As the world's first and only true Application-Aware Storage platform, the Pillar Axiom marries storage infrastructure to applications running in virtual and physical server environments through customisable application profiles. Using these profiles, the Pillar Axiom allows administrators to automate storage provisioning aligned to application priority. A simple management interface reduces complexity and administrative time. Pillar's unique architecture consolidates storage in a single, multi-tenancy scalable platform to lower capital and operating expense while increasing productivity and efficiency.

"Pillar already has an exceptionally efficient approach to storage, delivering better disk utilisation rates than most traditional architecture storage systems," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "By adding Thin Provisioning, the Pillar Axiom unquestionably raises the bar even further. Combine that with a storage platform that automatically adapts to the varying requirements of multiple applications within a data centre, and you have a pretty compelling value proposition."

Pillar is also making available advanced 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.

Pillar's CloneFS/LUN is a writeable block snapshot with no impact to cache or system performance. Unlike competitive offerings, Pillar's 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.

This announcement also includes a new innovative feature to efficiently lay out data in the Pillar Axiom - Pooled RAID10. These technologies can double performance while eliminating the large performance degradation seen by competing storage systems during disk drive rebuilds.

Pillar's Pooled RAID10 maximises performance for random, write-intensive applications. OLTP-type applications and Microsoft Exchange, for example, run up to 50 per cent 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.

Availability Thin provisioning, CloneFS, Clone LUN, and Pooled RAID10 from Pillar Data Systems are available now to Beta programme customers. These features will be generally available March 14, 2008.

Notes to Editors

About Pillar Data Systems
Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops Application-Aware Storage systems for midsize and enterprise organisations. With the highest utilisation rates in the storage industry, the Pillar Axiom solution is the most efficient storage system on the market today. The Pillar Axiom cuts administrative time and total cost of ownership by more than 50 percent as well as provides the only storage system that can differentiate services based on application priority. Designed from the ground up as the only true Application-Aware Storage system, the Pillar Axiom allows users to match multiple application characteristics to the appropriate service levels within a single storage platform.

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.