"As drive capacities increase in size, it becomes more and more important to work with a storage vendor whose product can not only take full advantage of the performance of these newer drives, but also the expanded capacity," said Mike Workman, CEO and Chairman, Pillar Data Systems. "The Axiom's unrivaled utilization rates mean customers can reduce their storage purchases by more than 50 per cent, without sacrificing capacity or performance. Once again, Pillar takes storage efficiency to a whole new level."

The Pillar Axiom has the unique ability to offer two types of QoS data migration functionality that fully leverages the differing characteristics of fibre channel and SATA drives. The first mode of data migration is permanent, where infrequently accessed or non-critical data is transparently moved to lower cost, higher capacity SATA drives. Conversely, mission critical, often accessed data is stored on the higher performance, ultra reliable fibre channel drives. The Axiom allows the administrator to choose between user initiated and automated data migration for LUNs and file systems.

Temporary data migration functionality in the Axiom allows for dynamic reassignment of QoS levels based on the real-time need of the application. For example, in a database being created for transaction processing, the QoS level is set accordingly to allow for optimal OLTP transactions; however, the initial load of the data is a sequential operation. The database can be created in the proper QoS setting for OLTP, and then the QoS level can be temporarily changed to high performance write sequential bias to make the initial load operation much faster. Once the initial load is completed, the QoS setting can be reverted back to the original, optimal QoS setting.

The Pillar Axiom 600 features 80 per cent disk utilization, the highest in the industry and double the industry average, 99.999 per cent availability per system and a wide range of Application-Aware Storage Profiles designed to simplify storage provisioning and optimize the storage system for multiple applications.