The Pillar Axiom storage system features unique software designed to automatically perform most SAN provisioning and management capabilities. This significantly simplifies the management of your SAN, while eliminating much of the system complexity of traditional SANs.

In fact, most Pillar customers set up their Axiom system and begin using it within a few hours. The easy-to-use interface enables most operators to learn the essentials of SAN and NAS management on an Axiom system, without formal training. The software also enables you to provision policy-based LUNs through the intuitive graphic user interface (GUI).

Storage managers can consolidate multiple DAS resources into one Pillar Axiom storage system. With Pillar, you can differentiate I/O performance according to the specific needs of each data type, so active Exchange files can share disk space with backup and archive Exchange files. This enables you to more efficiently use disk space without compromising performance, which leads to higher disk drive utilisation rates, reducing the cost per GB over DAS or traditional SANs.

The modular Pillar Axiom allows flexible scalability over time. Administrators can scale performance by adding up to four Slammer storage controllers per system. And they can scale capacity to nearly 575 TB of raw capacity per system, with more capacity to come.

The Pillar Axiom storage system is the ideal storage platform for Microsoft Exchange environments and any situation that could benefit from a multipurpose storage system that can deliver SAN and NAS storage in a single footprint. This flexibility allows IT departments to scale computing resources easily while also lowering their total cost of ownership (TCO).

Pillar SAN storage solutions assist budget-constrained, small IT staffs to manage their Exchange environments during corporate growth. With Pillar's simplified set-up, provisioning, and management software, smaller IT groups can get and keep their storage systems up and running in less time. Additionally, the Pillar Axiom system requires virtually no training to set up and use. And the same user interface works for SAN and NAS, configurations - all of which are possible in the same system, from a common pool of storage.

With data capacity growing between 50 and 70 percent per year (based on Gartner and IDC reports), you need to manage more data with existing resources. According to IDC, companies were able to manage an average of 29.2TB per storage administrator in DAS environments versus 49.9TB per administrator in a networked environment. Moving to a SAN or NAS environment allows you to manage almost twice as much data with the same personnel.

With its easy set-up and maintenance, the Pillar Axiom helps you avoid expensive consulting fees. The Guided Maintenance software allows administrators to troubleshoot problems quickly, avoiding costly downtime and service calls. And the one-time licensing fee means no hidden costs when you need to scale the system as you grow.

Policy-based dynamic performance, set with an intuitive GUI , allows the storage administrator to optimize and guarantee performance of the Pillar Axiom for Microsoft Exchange. This innovative approach allows the administrator to guarantee Service Levels to important applications and still keeping storage utilisation high.

The Pillar Axiom system supports multiple tiers on a single storage platform. You create a set of policies to govern the performance dynamics for the file system or LUN. These policies determine where data is laid out on the portion of the disk that best supports its performance priority.

The Pillar Axiom allows you to adjust storage requirements to meet the changing needs of your database environments.

There are often hidden costs that stress budgets. Scaling the Pillar Axiom is straightforward: just add Axiom Slammer controllers for performance, and Axiom Brick storage enclosures for capacity and additional IO, with no additional licensing fees. Administrators can allocate space to meet production, development, test, and archive requirements.

The Pillar Axiom design incorporates standard high-availability features that other SAN vendors list as expensive add-ons. The entire system is interconnected through dual pathways to the host and among components. Each SATA Brick storage enclosure has dual local RAID controllers plus a hot-spare disk drive. This enables you to rapidly rebuild a drive in case of failure, in hours (not days), without impacting overall system performance.

RAID striping -- with up to four mirrored sets and optional AxiomONE Continuous Data Protection snapshots -- keep Exchange data available even during a rebuild. The Slammer storage controller has no single point of failure, dual motherboards, dual power supplies, and automatic active-active failover to up to four Slammers per system. Additionally, the dual- motherboard architecture of Pilot management controller helps you maintain system accessibility without requiring clustering.

The combination of dual CPUs (which improve performance) and dual motherboards (which add failsafe/no single point of failure) gives you the agility, scalability, and reliability you need for mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange.