February 6 2008

Pillar Data Systems delivers world's first and only true Application-Aware Storage

enhanced features to Axiom platform enable greater application performance, lowered costs and increased storage efficiencies

Pillar Data Systems has announced the world's first Application-Aware storage system.

The Pillar Axiom is the only storage platform to allow an administrator to define the application type and its associated values. The system automatically tunes itself to deliver differentiated storage service levels based on application priority.

What truly differentiates the Pillar Axiom is its ability to manage multiple and varying types of applications on a single platform, maintaining the unique values and characteristics of each. The resulting benefits include a 50 per cent reduction in administrative expenses and total cost of ownership, as well as industry-leading disk utilisation of up to 80 per cent.

Dynamically reassign resources temporarily or permanently.
The proliferation of applications and the constantly changing needs of the business require a storage infrastructure that can adapt to those changing needs. The Pillar Axiom is the only storage system on the market today with the flexibility to meet those dynamic requirements.

Provision storage like you provision servers.
By provisioning Application-Aware Storage as seamlessly as users provision virtual servers, management and maintenance becomes a simpler task - and infrastructure optimisation becomes automatic. With Pillar, storage administrators are able to provision a LUN in six clicks, eliminating the operational inefficiencies associated with today's legacy infrastructures.

Slash administration time.
Simplified management combined with a system that can be tuned to specific service level needs of multiple applications greatly reduces administrative time.

"We view today's announcement as a game-changing event in the data storage industry," said Mike Workman, chairman and CEO, Pillar Data Systems. "Just as Pillar led the industry in bringing forth new technologies and driving greater data centre efficiencies, we're pioneering the integration between application and storage by bringing to market truly Application-Aware Storage."

If data is the lifeblood of an organisation, the applications are its heart. Cost control and risk mitigation in data centres typically are adversarial pursuits. Ensuring application uptime and performance within those constraints is the data centre manager's primary objective.

All applications are not created equal. All data is not created equal. As storage administrators look to control costs in their data centres, the ability to match their storage resources with the value of data at the application level promises that their overall IT environment is optimised, from the application to the underlying infrastructure.

"Pillar saw a need and recognised that a company's storage environment shouldn't just house data, but should support the unique needs of every application'" said David Riley, CIO, Foundry Networks. "With the highest utilisation rates in the industry, Pillar Axiom allows us to dynamically optimise our storage environment to the associated applications that run our business. Since Pillar offers optimal performance to our applications, we also don�t have to worry about trading out performance for additional storage."

Pillar Data Systems will extend, over the next 90 days, its Application-Aware Storage platform with several enhanced features and specific configurations to address the needs of database, virtualisation, messaging and data protection applications.

"It's hard to argue with a strategy that says marrying the specific requirements of an application to a finely tuned infrastructure is anything but good," said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder,,Enterprise Strategy Group. "This is the next frontier of storage intelligence."

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. .