Features

Thin Provisioning For True Virtual Addressing

Pillar’s networked storage solutions deliver on virtualization’s promise of commoditized storage while reaching a high level of performance, scalability, reliability, and value.

Pillar delivers an industry unique feature that allows the customer to establish service level tiers within the platform to maximize performance of each application and maximize the utilization of the entire system. No other thin provisioning vendor provides the ability to consolidate multiple applications in a single, multi-tenancy array while allowing administrators to assign a dynamic quality of service to each virtual volume. 

The result? See your utiliSation rates soar up to 80% or even higher, all wile maintaining consistent performance.

• High efficiency and ease of management to reduce TCO

High Efficiency and Ease of management to Reduce TCO

The Pillar Axiom is the most efficient storage system available today—saving you as much as 75 percent of the energy required to power and cool most storage infrastructures. It also has the smallest footprint in the industry—saving not only on power and cooling costs, but on valuable physical “real estate” in the data center as well.

The Pillar Axiom can be managed with its own intuitive interface or using VMware’s VirtualCenter, allowing you to manage the complete virtualized system without relying on dedicated storage administrators. With features like automatic tuning, six-click deployment, remote “call home” to alert you to issues before they become problems, and guided maintenance, using the Axiom with a virtual infrastructure can cut your administrative costs by as much as 50%.. And finally, as you scale your storage solution, you don’t incur additional licensing fees which greatly reduces your TCO.

Industry-Best Utilisation Rates

Consolidating your storage in to the application-aware Pillar Axiom and consolidate multiple data management cost centers to a single value center. Greater capacity doesn’t mean as much if your utilisation is low. By eliminating the silos of storage, and by implementing its unique provisioning capabilities, the Pillar Axiom can help you achieve utilisation rates as high as 80% - or even higher. That’s double the industry average.

VMware Integration

Pillar Data Systems is a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. With combined extensive knowledge in the design, implementation, and maintenance of virtualized infrastructures, Pillar and VMware provide enterprises with an integrated, highly available, flexible, and scalable solution that improves data center efficiencies.

The combined solution offered by Pillar and VMware enables users to drive maximum storage efficiency in a variety of application environments, effectively consolidating their peripheral elements to achieve high efficiency quotients.

Provisioning for Quality or Service

VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler will move virtual machines based upon CPU and memory capacity contention, but the Axiom’s robust QoS features are required to provision the storage—to adjust for disk-based performance. With the Pillar Axiom you can  consolidate multiple applications in a single, multi-tenancy array while allowing administrators to assign a dynamic quality of service to each virtual volume.  Pillar’s approach allows you to provide sparse file systems and LUNs in support of the unique needs of each application.

With Pillar you move beyond the traditional practice of allocating storage—a practice that ultimately reduces utilisation and “strands” disk space and leaves it unused. Thin provisioning is recognised in the industry as a critical approach to simplifying storage management while drastically improving storage capacity utilisation.

Modular Architecture For Easy Scalability Without Compromise

The Axiom hardware architecture is based on a modular approach that provides complete redundancy and linear scaling of capacity and performance. Need to add space? Simply add a new 1TB SATA drive to your array—or add a new Brick with up to 13TB. When you add a new SATA drives of any capacity to an existing fibre channel drive system, it is seamlessly migrated, and the existing provisioning settings are automatically applied to the new drives when they become part of the storage pool. 

As your business grows and needs additional capacity, Pillar allows for modular additions of any drive type without the hassle of manual data migration. It’s easy to add storage capacity to your Pillar Axiom, storing hundreds of terabytes within a single system—up to 830TB of raw capacity in a single system.

Pooled RAID 10 to Increase Write Throughput

RAID 10 is a performance enhancement for work loads with heavy random-writes, such as OLTP (online transaction processing). Pooled RAID 10 can be set on a LUN by LUN basis and does not require that an entire Brick be either RAID5 or RAID10. With RAID 10, you can expect your OLTP applications to have improved write throughput by as much as 50% compared to RAID 5 configurations. And you can achieve this improvement with lower cost SATA drives instead of fibre channel. 

And in the case of disk rebuilds for disaster recovery, Pillar’s Accelerated Drive Rebuild feature can cut your recovery time in half.

AxiomONE Software For Power and Ease of Management

AxiomONE™ software is an integrated software suite designed exclusively for the Pillar Axiom platform that allows customers to simplify complexity and reduce the cost of managing information. It enables a simple-to-manage, highly available, uniquely scalable storage solution. Read more about AxiomONE software