Features

In a virtualised environment, the virtual machines (VMs) and shared storage are inseparable. For this reason, the business advantages of virtualising your environment are realised only when the storage system is optimized and managed within the virtual infrastructure.

With storage making up a large portion of a data center’s hardware budget, an important benefit of virtualization is its promise of commoditising storage. Pillar storage solutions deliver on that promise while providing a high level of performance, scalability, reliability, and value. The Pillar Axiom storage solution features AxiomONE™ Dynamic Performance, which dynamically provisions your data based on its changing business needs—all on a single storage device. This allows you to use a single storage solution for all tiers of data rather than separate storage devices with different interfaces, management techniques, and licensing fees.  

Dynamic Performance from Pillar provisions data at a lower cost and without increasing the complexity of your storage environment with discrete systems. Even when using one-terabyte disks, the Pillar approach to provisioning data allows for operation without performance degradation.

High Availability and Scalability to Grow With Your Data Centre

The Axiom hardware architecture is based on a modular approach that provides redundancy and linear scaling of capacity and performance. Pillar’s high availability and redundancy exist at all levels of the storage system to provide the reliability and availability required by virtual infrastructures as they scale into the hundreds and thousands of virtual servers. With this level of redundancy, even if parts of your storage solution need to replaced, you can do so with limited or even no downtime.

With the high availability of Pillar storage solutions, combined with easy scalability, you’ve got a system that meets today’s aggressive data growth needs. Axiom allows you to scale both I/O bandwidth, performance, and capacity in a predictable and simple manner as you scale your virtualised server environment. It’s easy to add storage capacity to your Pillar Axiom, storing hundreds of terabytes within a single system.

Improved Efficiency Means Improved ROI

The Pillar Axiom is the most efficient storage system available today. This is an especially important benefit in light of a recent EPA study that found that of the total electricity consumed in the U.S. in 2006, approximately 1.5% was consumed by data centres. Not only does the Pillar Axiom save up to 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 centre as well. The benefits of “going green” go way beyond the reduced load on the environment. This results in a highly efficient storage system that adds to the energy and space savings inherent in virtual infrastructures and improving your ROI.

Another efficiency from Pillar is its ease of management. The Pillar Axiom is managed using a very simple interface, but it can also be managed from within the Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control console—which will be available for use with Oracle VM in 2008. This allows your storage solution to be managed by your DBAs without reliance on system administrators.

Oracle Integration

Pillar Data Systems is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork. In fact, Pillar has worked closely with Oracle since its founding, including a close relationship between the Pillar and Oracle engineering teams.With combined extensive knowledge in the design, implementation, and maintenance of database systems and virtualised infrastructures, Pillar and Oracle provide enterprises with an integrated, highly available, flexible, and scalable solution that improves data center efficiencies.

Supported by Windows and Linux based guest Operating systems, Oracle VM Server is built around the open source Xen hypervisor (originally from Xensource and now a part of Citrix). It  has been certified to work with Oracle databases, Fusion middleware and Oracle applications including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and other Oracle Applications. This high level of integration means that VMs created in this environment can be managed using Oracle’s web browser-based VM Manager management console.  Oracle customers now have a way to consolidate their resources as everything from Oracle VM, Oracle Unbreakable Linux and the Oracle stack (Oracle) is now serviced by a single source.

Together, Oracle VM for server virtualisation and Pillar’s virtualisation of tiered storage provides the most flexible, scalable, and efficient architecture for supporting Oracle Applications. The strength of the Pillar Axiom lies in its ability to separate and prioritize the performance requirements for Oracle Application and Database servers running on each Oracle VM, allowing the system to expand storage capacity or performance in line with the user’s requirements.

Provisioning for Quality or Service

A key technology in making the Pillar Axiom the world’s most efficient storage system is its unique ability to easily provision data based on business need. Because Pillar consolidates both SAN and NAS for Oracle-based applications on a single platform, customers can more efficiently manage both Oracle Application and Oracle Database servers in a shared resource pool while managing QoS levels with different storage characteristics. No other storage provider provides this type of unique value proposition. The system uses Pillar’s Dynamic Performance Manager software to separate and prioritize the performance requirements for each application or database on each array, allowing the system to expand capacity or performance in line with the user’s requirements.

Linear Performance Through Capacity Scaling

A virtual infrastructure storage system requires that components maintain linear performance scalability. The modular approach of the Pillar Axiom meets this requirement, providing redundancy and linear scaling of capacity and performance. Because consistent performance through capacity scaling has been architected into all components, you can scale the virtual infrastructure from dozens to thousands of virtual servers with predictable performance that guarantees virtual machine service levels.

Capacity is expanded by adding virtual servers. Maintaining multiple virtual disk files in each LUN, combined with the resource sharing inherent in virtualization, results in increased random disk I/O with each virtual server added. The one-to-one relationship between the hardware RAID controllers and RAID groups in the Pillar Brick components along with the massive data cache in the Pillar Slammer create an exceptionally scalable solution. The result is a virtual infrastructure that can scale from dozens to thousands of virtual servers with predictable performance that guarantees virtual machine service levels.