Pillar's new drive can extend its Axiom storage system's capacity to as high as 760TB.Pillar Data Systems Oct. 3 introduced its first 1-terabyte Serial ATA disk drive, for use in its frontline Axiom storage system.
Pillar OEMs its new drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. On Jan. 5, Hitachi unveiled what it claimed to be the industrys first 1TB hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000. Seagate Technology and Western Digital -- the only two U.S.-based disk drive makers -- also make 1TB drives.
With the new Hitachi drive, a user can now expand the Axioms overall usable capacity to a maximum of 760TB, a company spokesperson said.
"Conventional storage packages generally force users into a tradeoff scenario between capacity and performance," Bob Maness, vice president of marketing for Pillar Data Systems, based in San Jose, Calif., told eWEEK.
"Pillar doesnt operate that way. [The] Axiom systems modular architecture efficiently and nondisruptively scales to capacity to meet the demands of the business, while maintaining performance, reliability and cost service levels."
Pillar offers a high-end, highly virtualized storage architecture that runs on commodity servers, is modular in design and is aimed at a wide range of markets—from high-end financial companies and law firms to small and midsize businesses, CEO and co-founder Mike Workman told eWEEK.
Pillar recently completed a survey of more than 250 customers and found that, on average, Pillar Axiom users see an industry-leading 62 percent written disk utilization. One-third of those customers are utilizing more than 80 percent of their disk array resources, Workman said.
Most conventional storage array systems utilize only 30 to 35 percent of their capacity before suffering a steep I/O performance drop off, Workman said.
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"What separates Pillar even further is that these figures are written utilization, not allocated, as is customary by all other vendors," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst for the Taneja Group.
"These are clearly industry-leading utilization rates and support Pillars position that its Axiom storage system is one of the most efficient disk systems on the market today. By driving utilization rates so high without suffering performance losses, Pillar [ensures that its] customers are deriving maximum value and efficiency out of their storage investments."
Pillars ability to consolidate multiple data management cost centers into a single value center is what makes the Axiom unique. Associated costs drop and utilization rates increase when multiple applications and tiers of storage are consolidated into one single platform—all while maintaining an effective quality of service for each.
The Axioms ability to consolidate multiple storage functions into a single array has proven to drastically increase storage utilization, but at a much lower level of capital spending, Workman said.
The week of Sept. 24, Pillar announced it has expanded its strategic reseller relationship with FalconStor Software as well as its individual relationships with Data Domain, Diligent Technologies and Symantec to deliver a variety of data deduplication capabilities. Customers will now have a choice of any of those three vendors to supply that software.
As part of these relationships, the Pillar Axiom is now fully integrated with FalconStor VirtualTape Library and is fully interoperable with the Data Domain Gateway Series, Diligent ProtecTIER software, and Symantecs Veritas NetBackup PureDisk deduplication technology.
The 1TB drive for the Pillar Axiom is available for order now.
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