Professor O.J.M. Smith, once told me that you could tell what the impact of a technology, or product was on the planet by looking at its real cost (no subsidies, tariffs or taxes included).  If a piece of recycled paper cost more to manufacture than a piece of new paper, it was worse for the planet than the new paper. If you think about this it makes total sense, and it becomes obvious.

So, if your intent is to produce a storage system that stores more for less cost, it is equivalent to producing a more environmentally friendly product. And if you do that with lower power disk drives that gain their density because of lower SNR of slower spinning disks, the result is a product that yields a product that is more efficient than alternative systems.

When we started Pillar we intended to bust the paradigm that high performance necessitated high RPM. We intended to prove that SATA could be made into an enterprise class product and not relegated to “near store”. We didn’t intend to build a far more efficient platform for on-line storage, but we did.

Sure, everyone builds storage with SATA now; the arguments against it have subsided substantially. Not everyone builds enterprise storage with SATA disk though. And nobody gets performance and versatility out of SATA disk like Pillar does. When we started Pillar, most in the industry said you can’t get performance out of SATA; SATA disk wouldn’t work in the enterprise arena. Well, they were wrong about that. Score one for the greening of the planet.

Speaking of green - we also chose green as our corporate color. We did that 5 years ago.  We did it because we liked it, not because we were jumping on a bandwagon.  We were born green, but we have never claimed that we were prescient

Mike