A few people have asked me what our corporate messaging really means. In fact, some of our competitors have even embraced our message as their own. I think it’s funny others are copying it – especially those that don’t even seem to know what the heck they’ve copied. At Pillar, we actually do care about what it really means, so I will explain it with specific examples.

The true value of Application Aware storage is the ability to set Application Profiles and configure hardware resources to improve utilization and performance. Profiles segregate LUNs or file systems within an application – each of which has its own Quality of Service (QoS).  The entire application performs at a higher level if this is done properly (which is what the profiles do automatically if you are working with a common application). The result is that the total application performance is greater than the performance individual data stores!  

For instance, in a Server Virtualization environment it is the segregation of the OS Volume, the application volume, and swap space.

In a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) environment, it is the VTL volume, the single instance volume, and the index volume.

If you follow EMC best practices, you put all your eggs in one basket by creating a virtual machine on each file system. But with Pillar Axiom storage system you segregate each virtual machine in to its components as I outlined above.

To illustrate, we configured an Axiom for three simple cases:

VM1: OS, application, and swap all on a single SATA LUN
VM2: OS, application, and swap all on a single FC LUN
VM3: OS and swap on separate SATA LUNs; application on FC LUN

We observe that VM3 performed much better than VM2 (as much as 2x) or VM1 (as much as 3x)! 

The beauty of it is, that you don’t even need FC disk drives. The above setting is just one profile – for one VM! If you have 2 VMs and the VMs need different QoS, you can do that too. 

Here is a profile of 2 VMs running similar applications in tandem and needing different Quality of Service (QoS) levels.

Now that is truly compelling.

The Axiom policy-based manager allows you to do this in about five clicks of a mouse. While it is possible to lay this out on a competitor’s system in a similar fashion, should you need to change it, all that work has to be done all over again….and you have to migrate the data!  Compare that to Axiom – where you just change the QoS, decide whether to allow data migration, and all the work is done for you. Hell, you can even change it automatically at the end of month crunch time for example and then change it back.

The above examples illustrate the power of a storage system invented more recently than OS/2 version 2 and Windows 3.1….(that would be circa 1992).