We can all remember 36GB FC 15K RPM drives, and 160GB SATA desktop drives. I say remember because you can’t really even buy these anymore, unless you shop on eBay. Today, we talk of 300GB and 1TB capacities instead.

The HDD Industry is spectacular in my opinion. Much of what the IT industry has been able to accomplish owes itself to our ability to store massive amounts of stuff very economically.  I am biased here as I spent 20 years of my life working in the HDD industry, and I loved it.

HDD performance has not kept pace with aerial density increases. We all know this one. Performance in an HDD means motors and things that move, and we all know that those things will not keep pace with solid state technology advances.

So what can you do about it?  Buy the drives you can buy, convince yourself that you can use the capacity, and then forgo the capacity because you need IO’s. This means underutilization – don’t even think you are going to fill the disk drives to their capacity.

Unless you buy Pillar Axiom and use networked storage differently than you have for the last 10 years. Pillar allows you to extract both the capacity and the IO’s from a set of spindles as long as you share those spindles amongst applications that have varying requirements for speed and capacity.

If you want to use Axiom to do what our competitors do, you can. In fact it is extremely competitive. But with Axiom you can, and in my opinion should, use storage differently than you are used to: Define a storage pool, Tier your applications and point them at the pool for their storage.

The result? Higher utilization, full use of the disk you paid for, less stove-piping of platforms, lower cost. For all of us, this represents some important relief from the ever increasing HDD capacity march that heightens the disparity between that capacity and the performance with which it can be delivered.