Well, you do if you own or operate a storage array. Storage systems have lots of components, including mechanical ones like disk drives. The whole point of RAID is to deal with failures of parts. Moving parts fail most often. Most systems today (not all) have redundancy built-in throughout the entire system. In an Axiom, all those redundant parts do work for the array all the time because it is an active-active architecture. Some arrays have active-passive architectures that waste those components that just sit around waiting for a failure.

So, what happens when a component fails? Well, in HA systems like Axiom, Clariion, and NetApp products, customers still have access to their data. Paramount in all but the most trivial storage applications is being able to get at your data regardless of any single failure.

What goes mostly unspoken is the effect of a failure on performance. Systems from NetApp and EMC can take a long time under load to rebuild their failed disks onto a spare drive. In fact, it can take more than a day! This matters because while the rebuild is in progress, the array is running without protection against another failure. The odds of a second failure are small, but get proportionately larger as the rebuild times grow longer.

To solve this problem, some storage manufactures put yet another redundant disk drive into their arrays. So you pay for more unusable capacity and power to protect yourself against the vendor’s long rebuild times. This is a great technique against loss of data, but wasteful and expensive. In contrast, Pillar’s Axiom drastically reduces the drive rebuild time by using a distributed hardware RAID architecture. Distributed RAID gives the following clear, demonstrable benefits that have been measured by outside laboratories against our competitors:

1. We rebuild faster than any array on the market.
2. We perform better under faulted conditions by a HUGE margin, factors of 2-3.
3. We perform under all faulted conditions with minor loss of performance, on the order of 0-8%, versus 50% loss of performance from some vendors.

While most everyone guarantees continuous access to data under fault, they really don’t want to talk about the systems’ performance under those fault conditions. Why does this matter? Well, backup window integrity, customer perceived performance, boot times, the list goes on and on. They all depend on predictable, reasonable performance of the system, not 3 to 1 variations in performance under fault.

If you want great performance under fault conditions of any type, buy the Axiom. Your mileage may vary, but it will vary a hell of a lot less with the Axiom than with our competitors.