February 26 2008

Pillar Data Systems announces Application-Aware Storage profile for use in virtual server environments

Pillar Axiom's Application-Aware Storage profile drives greater performance and efficiency

Pillar Data Systems, the leading provider of Application-Aware storage systems, has launched the availability of application profiles for use in virtual server environments, including VMware and Oracle VM.

This follows a series of application profiles Pillar has made available with the delivery of its Application-Aware Storage system (announced earlier this month).

Pillar Axiom's Application-Aware Quality of Service (QoS) technology eliminates the need for companies to purchase double the amount of storage required. This alleviates the utilisation and performance degradation associated with virtualised server projects.

The Pillar Axiom is the only storage system to allow administrators to provision storage uniquely tuned to the application needs and priorities running on virtual servers by using profiles. Storage can be provisioned in both a 'thin' and 'physical' context. The administrator simply selects an application profile from a drop-down menu in the AxiomONE management console. Once selected, the profile automatically configures the Axiom in a way that maximises performance for the application running in a virtual machine by assigning greater priority, more cache, and faster spindles to those actions deemed most important.

"Businesses are demanding IT to bring on more applications, but at the same time reduce the number of physical assets, and the associated power and space requirements" said Bob Maness, vice president of marketing, Pillar Data Systems. "Their storage environments are the first place they look to reduce these physical assets. When deciding to move to a virtualised environment, the IT administrator needs to build an infrastructure where virtual servers and virtual storage work together to provide differentiated performance, utilisation, and availability service levels based on different application priorities."

"As the world's first and only true Application-Aware Storage system, the Pillar Axiom has a rich feature-set to handle the storage capacity demands of virtual servers as we differentiate service levels similar to virtualised servers," said Maness.

Typically,server virtualisation projects require as much as two-four times more storage to mitigate the utilisation and performance degradation associated with traditional storage systems in virtual environments. The Pillar Axiom alleviates this problem and increases cost savings by reducing deployment time, management, and training costs while providing as much as three times the disk utilisation rates of competing storage systems. Additionally, the Axiom reduces storage administration complexity by automating data layout and volume allocation prioritisation - even with applications that fluidly change due to virtual server resource scheduling and load balancing.

In addition to provisioning an array to provide optimal performance service levels to applications, the Axiom can dynamically assign or re-assign storage to improve performance for the applications deemed most important, allowing an increased amount of virtual machines to be placed on a physical server by clearing up back-end storage contention. This helps reduce or eliminate the server I/O bottleneck in high consolidation projects.

"It's good to see Pillar expanding the list of specific uses for its recently announced Application-Aware storage platform" said Mark Peters, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Tuning the Axiom to virtualised server environments makes a lot of sense. ESG research has found that 54 per cent of current users say server virtualisation has required a net increase in their total storage capacity."

"For many users this is an unexpected and unpleasant surprise; and it's a hindrance to the adoption of virtualised servers that Pillar can help mitigate. By managing storage resources based on application needs, the Axiom can provide performance and utilisation gains compared to traditional storage systems," said Peters.

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.