The Product
In the Pillar Axiom™ storage system, all tiers of data reside on a single platform, with a single management interface, under a single software license.
 Pillar Axiom is designed to seamlessly accommodate SAN or NAS, or both giving both complete access to the same storage pool. Each component is designed for high availability and failover. The infrastructure enables resources to be dynamically allocated to the right application, or the right server as needs require. For extreme levels of reliability, the system can replicate data two or even three times to survive the highest levels of failures. Inside the system, industry standard components keep costs down and make scaling easy.
Hardware:
The system is comprised of three hardware components:
■ Pilot Policy Controllers – These are the interface to configure and manage the Pillar Axiom storage system, including allocating resources, specifying QoS, defining settings and support, and providing for backup services.
■ Slammer Storage Controllers – These front end controllers, available as SAN or NAS, connect via customer networks to customer’s servers, and represent high-performance data managers and movers. These boxes can allocate priority for the storage system’s resources to an individual application.
■ Brick Storage Enclosures – These house the actual disk. To add capacity, a user simply adds more Serial ATA (SATA) or Fibre Channel bricks to match cost and performance demands.
Software:
Pillar has simplified storage management to enable administers to focus on managing their workload, not the storage system.
■ Storage provisioning – such as the configuration wizard, policy-based management, and storage capacity planning wizard are designed to simplify setup and provisioning.
■ Storage management – including job-scheduling policies, data protection services, and virus protection work together to provide structure, backup and restoration, and data protection from viruses.
Product Highlights
■ Policy-based management – This approach significantly reduces operational costs and complexities by managing multiple tiers of storage performance, availability, data protection, capacity, and scalability
delivered from a single Pillar Axiom system.
■ One-time software licensing – Users have access to multiple software options, and may add brick storage enclosures and slammer storage controllers to their system without the burden of incurring additional software licensing.
■ Self-diagnostics – In addition to traditional failover capabilities, the system has self-diagnostics that act as a self-healing function, enabling the system to proactively take its own repair actions when necessary.
■ Powerful storage management – Included with every Pillar Axiom storage system is an intuitive, single GUI for provisioning and management of the system’s SAN and NAS environments. Major features include system setup, storage allocation, data management, predictive performance modeling, system health monitoring and reporting and usage statistics gathering and reporting.
■ One solution/one platform – Users don’t have to buy another mutually exclusive storage system, they just have to add more resources to the existing Pillar system. Users can buy capacity as they need it, which translates into significantly lower storage acquisition and management costs.
■ Integration with network management software - The Pillar system integrates tightly with toolsstorage administrators use to manage the data center, such as CA Unicenter and HP Openview, and others.
|
