At Pillar, we have always prided ourselves on innovation. We invented QoS for Storage, and 5 years ago we built our storage administration around application templates. Essentially, when someone wants to set up LUNs for Oracle, Exchange, or SQL for example, they can follow best  practices configurations for any storage array. So, we felt at the time, if one follows best practices, why not just use a pull-down menu selection against standard applications that does all the work for you? Well, this is exactly the approach we took 5 years ago, and started shipping with the Pillar Axiom two and-a-halfyears ago. It was and still is a great idea, avoids re-inventing the wheel every time you layout storage for an application by allowing the admin to fill out the variables, like Capacity, I/O characteristics and such, and avoid having to configure disk drives in arrays like all the old school systems out there.

From our perspective,  application-awareness implies configuration of disk, but in the case of Pillar’s Axiom it also implies things like cache configuration, network bandwidth, CPU priority, and layout of data on the disk platters. In other words, all the system resources are tailored to the application – set up to make the application see the best possible disk attributes out of the resources in the array.

Let’s take an example. Let’s say you want to configure the LUNs for an Oracle 11g database and Oracle Apps. How would you do this? We know that the live database will require good random read and write performance on high performance disk, while archive partitions can use lower performance disk allowing the core database to stay optimally tuned. Finally, the applications themselves can reside as a lower priority than the database but higher than the archive partitions. These are all performance characteristics that the DBA can tell the storage administrator (or the storage administrator already knows). That storage administrator can choose to create profiles within the Axiom for these various workloads, and then simply provision capacity (as shown below); or even better, allow the Oracle DBA to assign capacity, using the newly created profiles, via Pillar’s integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager. And just in case there is a temporary need to improve performance (discovery motion or data mining) for an archive partition, the Axiom allows that administrator to change queuing and cache tuning (relative performance) on the fly, newly empowering that application for the duration of the required performance bump.

What if you change your mind or circumstances in your business change? No problem, Axiom migrates the data on the fly from one disk configuration to another, and unlike any other storage in the marketplace, it also changes CPU priority, queueing priority, cache configuration etc. So with Axiom, today’s choice is not tomorrow’s problem.

Thus, Application-Aware Storage is essentially storage that takes best practices into account and does all the work to configure your array resources to best meet those needs: Pillar’s Axiom does exactly that; automatically and dynamically.

Cool right? I suppose some people would rather write a bin file, or be forced into using RAID 4, but most of us would rather leave that piece of our past in the past.