Software, Storage And The Pillar Platform

Storage system startup Pillar Data Systems next week plans to introduce a new software suite to fortify its Axiom server.

Pillar's AxiomOne is a storage management suite designed to help customers get the most out of their data on the Axiom 500 machine.

The Axiom 500, which the company launched last year to store anywhere from 10 to 300 terabytes (define) of data, handles multiple types of applications on one platform.

The system also supports storage area network (SAN) (define) and network-attached storage (NAS) (define) protocols, as well as fibre channel (define) and serial ATA (define) storage types, on one system.

The appeal of such a "peered architecture" is that customers can move data stored on several different devices onto one big machine capable of handling their files regardless of what type of storage they were created on.

This approach saves space, money and time for overworked IT staffs.

While Pillar seems to have its hardware in place, and claims that customers are biting, fleshing out the software to manage the Axiom 500 only seemed natural.

AxiomOne was born.

Like the software platform of entrenched vendors EMC (Quote, Chart), IBM (Quote, Chart)  and HP (Quote, Chart), AxiomOne has many of the same ingredients, including data protection perks such as virtual tape library support, block and file replication software and continuous data protection.

But Russ Kennedy, senior director of marketing and strategy at Pillar, said AxiomOne will provide a superior quality of service for the software running on Axiom 500 machines that no other technical staff can offer for companies running different storage management software on Pillar servers.

"With our quality of service level management, we can support multiple applications and do it very well on one platform," Kennedy said.

Kennedy explained that AxiomOne allows users to manage NAS and SAN storage concurrently from a single interface that can be custom designed by the customer.

Key eatures of the software suite include Storage Services Manager, which includes an operating system, file system and management and maintenance interface for the Axiom platform.

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