Do people actually skin cats?  On second thought, I don’t really want to know.

This may sound obvious – but there are two valid ways to look at utilization and how it can save money.

But first, let’s start off by saying this: All storage systems allow 100% utilization of the useable capacity; all systems – this is by definition. So what the heck is an 80% utilization guarantee then?  The point is this: on most systems as you fill the arrays, the performance goes in the tank:

Pillar’s Utilization guarantee says that you can use 80% of the capacity before applications experience degradation in expected storage performance. Most of our competitors can’t do that. In an upcoming blog post I will explain how we do that and why others don’t get these results.

Pillar Axioms ability to use 80% of its storage without performance loss saves money for customers. You get to use more of your disk space before being forced to add spindles and therefore you buy fewer disks (which translates to capacity and spindles) than the other guys force you to buy in the first place. Fewer disks means lower purchase price, less rack space, and lower power and cooling costs.

Examples will illustrate the two ways of looking at utilization:

1)    You own a NetApps array and you have allocated 60% of its useable capacity. Whoa, don’t add more LUNS or file systems onto this array without adding more shelves of disks. The syrup drips off the ol’ WAFL when you start using all that space they want you to “reserve for snapshots”, because you need lots of free space to “write anywhere.” If you allocate more of your space, you’re in the crapper on performance. With Pillar, you can use another 20 points (80% total), guaranteed! Heck, 15% of our existing customers use run at >85% utilization. The savings here are obvious.

So this aspect of utilization is “Use more of what you own on an Axiom before having to buy more”.

2)    You need 40TB of storage. You can buy 50TB with Pillar (actually you can buy as little as 40TB as I said, but this is not a great idea). Don’t even think about trying to get by with 50TB from NetApps – you need to buy 67TB of usable capacity (the RAW numbers made my knees weak, so I didn’t even bother stating those numbers – remember that SNAP overhead, RAID DP, etc). At a competitive or equal $/GB, that means with the NetApps example you are looking at paying at least 33% more for the system. Add to that the additional support costs and power, cooling and footprint costs and you’re talking some real money!!

So this aspect of utilization is “Buy less up front with an Axiom than you need to buy with traditional arrays”.

This is just fun!  If you compare us to 3PAR using SATA, you are looking at more spindles because they don’t even support the 1TB disks that have been in the market for a year! (They also don’t support LUNS greater than 2TB either, but hey, that is a Blog for another day. I am straying off topic, sorry. Split-brain I guess).