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We announced the Axiom 600 and Axiom 600MC today, in the same month of our 3 year anniversary. I am proud of what we’ve achieved in our first three years, especially our fast growing installed base of 400 Customers, many of whom are running a suite of applications with Axiom as their storage target.

When people pile lots of Applications on a Slammer – it takes horsepower to virtualize a large storage pool. The Axiom 600 is about twice as fast as the Axiom 500, so for bigger installations our Customers can apply the AX600 to their advantage. The AX600 even improves CIFS and NFS performance on smaller NAS applications as well.

Axiom was designed to work better with larger workloads, hence our customers can drive up utilization and pool efficiency with many (especially disparate) applications connected to it. Thus, we built the Axiom 600 to extend the number of Applications, and spindles that can be supported before you have to add another Slammer (you can add 4 Slammers of any type or model to a storage pool). Of course our Axiom 500 customers can upgrade (about 12 have so far) to the Axiom 600 with their data in place.

Mike Vizard, SVP and Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Media wrote the following blog today in response to our announcement.

The Storage Virtualization Conundrum

The problem that most people are trying to solve when they start to dabble with storage virtualization is basically utilization. IT managers realize that most of their storage assets are way under utilized in terms of capacity, so they naturally want to look at ways of creating pools of storage across multiple devices that can be easily shared by any number of applications and servers.

To accomplish that, IT organizations have typically had to either upgrade to new storage hardware that supports the ability to pool storage or look for a software-based approach that would allow them to create virtual pools of storage from arrays supplied by different vendors. In either event, there are tradeoffs to be made. The upgrade to new storage virtualization is expensive and the systems themselves can be difficult to manage in terms of allocating pools of storage resources across application sets that can change dynamically. It takes a lot of finesse and skill to make that scale across the entire enterprise. Furthermore, if they take a software-based approach to storage virtualization, they basically wind up turning off a lot of the value-added capabilities of their storage hardware as the intelligence for managing the storage infrastructure moves from being embedded in the hardware into what amounts to a generic storage application.

Against that backdrop the folks at Pillar Data Systems have decided to issue an interesting challenge as part of the release of their new Axiom 600MC storage controller. The company is guaranteeing customers that they will see 80 percent disk utilization, which they say is the highest in the industry and about twice as much utilization the average customer sees from any other storage solution.

The reason Pillar Data Systems can make this claim is because of their approach to policy-based storage management. By using a set of pull-down menus to essentially profile the storage requirements of each application, the Axiom 600MC makes sure that applications with similar performance requirements don't sit on the same array. This means that customers should only see a very limited amount of storage bottlenecks because the applications accessing any given disk array at the same time will have substantially different I/O performance characteristics. Essentially, this means that Pillar Data Systems is managing the process of intelligently distributing where the data resides across the arrays to both maximize utilization and reduce bottlenecks.

This really opens up the whole question of the value of storage virtualization given the fact that at least one vendor is now guaranteeing utilization rates of 80 percent. Essentially, IT organizations now need to ask themselves if they really need to go through the pain of creating and managing virtual pools of storage when they now have a more efficient way of basically throwing more hardware at the storage growth problem.

Time will tell if the whole issue of storage virtualization is going to be carried along by the rising momentum of server virtualization. There's certainly a lot of powerful marketing behind the storage virtualization concept. But the first question that any IT organization should really ask before they follow everybody down the virtualization path is exactly what problem are they trying to solve? And when they stop to think about that, they may just want to pause long enough to consider all the possibilities.

Mike Vizard clearly gets it. VMWare/Server Virtualization is about increasing server utilization to save costs in the evolving, more agile datacenter. Axiom is about Storage utilization to the same end – through an intelligent operating system that embeds QoS and Application-Awareness in the entire platform.

Oh, and the Axiom 600MC is a Mission Critical 5-9’s capable platform for very high-end Tier 1 applications. Guaranteed.

OK, so I will assume you accept that the old model of no prioritization of applications using storage in a storage pool is dumb. I will assume you’ve been reading my blog a bit and you now realize that there is a reason why networking instituted QoS, why airlines have first, business, and economy classes of service. Right? If not start here. If you don’t want to follow another stinking link, then let me summarize: Not all passengers, packets, LUNs or Filesystems are equal, and this inequality allows the Axiom to extract more value for the customer out of the disk drives using QoS for Storage.

So, for the skeptical folks out there, they try and shoot holes in the concept, which is a reasonable thing to do. Let’s pick a favorite, how is the Axiom any better than another system without QoS if for example you are sharing two high priority (call it Premium) LUNs?

To first order, it is not! If all you have is people that want first class tickets, there is no gain in differentiation, because you have defined a problem that allows none. That is simple! So if every Filesystem or LUN is equal, an old style system is just about as good as you can get anyway. Make sense? Well, with Axiom, the data placement on the platter and purposeful automatic striping across different spindles will give you a better and more automatic result than most of our competitors. On the other hand, the differentiation under those conditions is obtainable on any system as long as the data is laid out properly on the disk (manually if you aren’t using an Axiom), and you have enough cache.

OK, so let’s say we don’t define a silly example of two equal, high priority LUNs forced to share spindles. Let’s say we have 10 LUNs, and two are high priority relative to the rest. Let’s also assume that the Axiom is forced to share the spindles that they all reside on (it won’t share them unless it has to). Is this different? How can this be better than a system without QoS since there is sharing going on?

The answer is simple, and clear. To lay it out would be complex, but an example should make it abundantly obvious: Let’s say you are about to walk up to the ticket counter at an airline. Would you rather be in the first class line, or the main cabin? Well, assuming normal distribution of passengers, the answer is obviously first class. We all intuitively know that although you may be sharing the agent(s) with 2 or three other passengers, you aren’t sharing with 100 other passengers. Same applies for Axiom’s QoS. The difference is real, and worth money.

Look, this is not some mumbo jumbo cloud of smoke. Spindles and cache equal IOPS. If you can differentiate the application requirements by IO, capacity, and workload, a storage pool can meet a much wider range of simultaneous application requirements using QoS than without it for a given quantity of spindles. This means that in a world of ever increasing disk drive sizes, Axiom is the architecture that extracts the maximum value out of the storage technology you can afford. Period.

And this, my friends, is worth money - to you.

Our goal is to make your life simpler. We put the concept of true NAS/SAN integration on the map in my opinion. I think NetApps* beat us with the function, but their implementation was poor. Of course, we had a great SAN product, but 2.5 years ago we had one customer, so nobody really took us seriously either. So I will give them credit for being the first, but Pillar I think deserves credit for having a real SAN. Being fair, NetApp has improved their SAN implementation quite a bit in the last couple years.

One criticism I have heard from a BIG independent storage vendor is that we build a utility platform that competes against NS, CX and low-end DMX products. Duh? That is the whole point! The critics say we “have to” support SAN/NAS together. I say we do support SAN/NAS together … and the competition doesn’t. But I am speaking of facts, albeit with a bias, so I will quote Brian Garrett of ESG, taken from the March cover story in Storage Magazine by Jacob Gsoedl.

"With Symmetrix, Clariion, Celerra and Centera, EMC has four different solutions, each with its own code base and architecture, and it would make sense for EMC to head to a unified solution," says Brian Garrett, technical director, ESG Lab at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Why buy several platforms to serve all your requirements when one will do? Really! Stove-piping just jacks up the TCO to the benefit of the storage vendor, not the customer.

The article in Storage Magazine goes on to say all kinds of nice stuff about Pillar – and frankly we deserve it, but if I say any more you guys will think the marketing team at Pillar wrote this instead of me. For those of you who are suspicious, check out the footnote below....you can be sure they didn’t write that one.

OK – I will put one good one in for the Marketing Team – here she goes:

The same story describes the Pillar Axiom in the following way, “Pillar has supported FC, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS in its Axiom arrays from day one. A scalable architecture, offloading of file-system protocol and RAID processing to so-called Slammers, and cluster support make the Axiom array family a great fit for SMBs and enterprises. Tight integration with Oracle tools like Oracle Enterprise Manager makes Axiom arrays a perfect fit in Oracle environments.

-Mike

* I know it is NetApp now, but for crying out loud could they be more sensitive about their name? Who cares about their stinking name? NTAP, Network Appliance, NetApp, they’re all just fine. What nobody can understand is why they changed their logo to one that looks familiar if you’ve been to Stonehenge. Perhaps they have a Druid on board over there? If they ever commission a sculpture for a stage prop with this logo – they better make sure they have their feet and inches straight or they could end up imitating a scene from Spinal Tap.

Contrary to the belief of some of our competitors, Axiom 300 is a full-fledged product. The software, look and feel, ease of use, and guided maintenance our customers love is the same as the Axiom 500. Besides being Application-Aware, the Axiom 300 has many features and functions that most competitors reserve for the Enterprise built into a great product for smaller applications.

The difference in the AX300 and the AX500 lies in the Slammer hardware; unique motherboards reduce power, cache, back-end connectivity to appropriate levels for smaller applications requiring fewer spindles (up to 54). There is not a lot of use in scaling to 832 spindles for smaller applications, so powering up all kinds of infrastructure to allow such scaling would be wasteful, and more costly than necessary.

While the Axiom 500 has unprecedented scalability in the marketplace, making it smaller did require a modified set of CPU boards for the Slammer. The great news for our customers who care to trade up is that they can, and with data in place. So in the event that their business scales much larger than they dreamed, they are protected!

Typically as storage vendors shrink their product offerings for smaller budgets many features and functions are dropped. In fact, at the bottom end of the scale “storage products” end up being a tray of disk drives without much software at all. While this is affordable (cheap), it also means the customer will spend lots of time managing their storage manually. With the Axiom 300 software customers have lots more help than they get with a RAID box. Try to get a RAID box to “Call Home”...or feature 6GB of cache memory.

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.

Here’s my recent interview with Cody Willard of the FOX Business Happy Hour show that broadcasts from the Bull and Bear Bar in NY’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Well… the second time was a charm! Nancy Holleran, Pillar’s President and COO, and I traveled out to Cape Canaveral to see STS-122 blast off (I love that term – I guess people are too sophisticated to say it anymore, but it’s fun).

Nancy and I decided it wasn’t optional – we both were recovering from the flu but how many chances does one get to see the dang Shuttle blast off anyway? I wrote about my first visit to the Kennedy Space Center in an earlier post. That launch was postponed, but it was still an emotional visit. This one was for REAL. Take a look at the attached pictures; I am sure you’ve seen similar ones before, so I suppose the whole point is you have to be there to fully appreciate them.

At liftoff, I suppose I stopped breathing for a while – I am not sure. At first it is dead silent because it takes about 20 seconds for the sound to hit you, but when it hits, it really hits you. Watching on TV or even IMAX can’t replicate the experience. There are two technology related reasons why.

The first reason you have to be there is that the experience has a huge sub-sonic component. I would imagine the sound pressure spectrum extends down to 3 or 4 hertz. This means that you feel it; you don’t just hear it. Much like a serious fireworks display – if you feel the concussion, ground shake, and heat on your face from a Cremora bomb – you are only then really experiencing the full fireworks experience.

The second reason you have to be there is because today’s technology and simulated experiences are just too damn good. Digital special effects like those of Industrial Light and Magic and other Hollywood studios are so damn good that we are treated to this kind of spectacle and drama all the time.

The difference is, when you are there watching in person, the experience hits you. This is real. This is very, very real. People are really risking their lives on this thing. The Earth is shaking, my chest is pounding and I am four miles away from it!

My God, this is real! I know I am a softy – but my eyes filled with tears once again. I guess I can’t help it. I love engineering and the human spirit that causes people to rise to this kind of challenge.

Thanks NASA. Thanks for the experience… and for 40 wonderful heart-pounding, inspiring years.

More photos of the blast off...

So I had the pleasure of working with Amy Haimerl at Fortune Small Business on an article about executives with “interesting” hobbies. I was honored, but I have to admit I am afraid that it made me look a bit goofy, if not downright eccentric. This is not what I had in mind when we were contacted by Amy – after all, this is Fortune – they wouldn’t write an article like this, would they?

Well they did, and as my friend Shel Israel says – when you blog you get to have your own say in what’s written, and if you want to you can add your own commentary☺

So to explain a little bit, I don’t really relax by “blowing things up”.  Well, I guess you could say Pillar is trying to blow up the status quo within the storage industry…( more on that in my next post).

When it comes to fireworks, I build “star shells” mostly. These are the aerial fireworks you see on the 4^th of July, or Football games, or New Years celebrations. It is a load of work, but it is great fun at the same time. Physics, Chemistry, Art, Mechanical Engineering, and even some Electrical Engineering are all involved as we build our own tools for production.

Before I get questions about legalities, we are indeed fully legal. We have a facility in the desert, we are licensed by the proper authorities, and we are regularly inspected as well. Same for wine – and we just barely stay under the legal limit for “hobby” home winemaking, which is 200 gallons per household per year (about 3.5 standard barrels).  It’s pretty good wine – Syrah, Petit Syrah, and Cabernet – and if you are interested in learning more about what we can do for your business, I’d be happy to share some with you when you visit Pillar. And I promise to leave the explosives in the desert!

I suppose the article could have taken a worse tack – that I get wasted and blow things up! Seriously, thanks Amy. I enjoyed talking with you. It was a fun interview.

I know you don’t come to this site for Seasons Greetings, but what the hell: Happy New Year to all!

We at Pillar will continue to strive for Customer satisfaction, innovations in storage that make your jobs easier to do, and being a partner you are proud to work with.

From all of us – thank you for working with Pillar.

My last post was on STS-122, thanking NASA, for the pleasure of visiting Kennedy Space center two weeks ago to view the launch of Space Shuttle. The launch was scrubbed and has now been rescheduled to January! Good thing I didn’t wait around Cocoa Beach for NASA to light the fuse on this baby.

As we viewed the Shuttle on the pad in the daylight, a guide told us that the external hydrogen fuel tank was its natural color; by leaving it unpainted, they could add an additional 600 pounds of payload to the orbiter! Thinking about that, it means that NASA has decided that it is OK to have an ugly external fuel tank, but they drew the line at leaving the Shuttle itself look like crap.
I am sure that someone can offer a reason it has to be painted so pretty that rationalizes the payload loss, but I bet it is pride. Don’t get me wrong, I think they made the right choice. Who wants to see some ugly contraption sitting on the launch pad with the letters USA on it?

At the end of the day, we all make compromises. NASA could have saved a few pounds perhaps on the Shuttle, but hey, pride is important and we deserve to doll it up a bit, don’t we?

Personally, I have struggled with the same decision at Pillar (obviously in a far less important or grandiose way), but the look of our product costs us a bit of money. We spent time and energy trying to make it look pretty. We have had hundreds of customers, analysts, even competitors opine on the aesthetic appeal of our product. At the same time there have been more than a few who say “who cares”.

Well, I suppose I care. It’s sort of like a car, I care that I am not drivin’ around in a car that looks like a dog’s rear end, and I care that our data centers look sharp. Who the heck wants to pay forty grand, or worse a million dollars for something that looks like you bought it at Walmart in the clearance baskets? I mean, the world can only stand so much purple, or chrome plated plastic right?

Thanks to NASA, I had the pleasure of visiting Kennedy Space center last week to view the launch of STS-122.  Unfortunately the launch was scrubbed and not rescheduled before I had to return home.

The trip was not in vain however; a group of us were afforded the opportunity to tour the preparation facilities and view the back-up shuttle Atlantis up close as it was being readied for its next flight.

The STS-122 mission continues construction of the International Space Station.  We were able to see many of the pieces of the ISS being readied for journey into orbit.

It is hard to describe the feelings one has when being up close to such a magnificent undertaking, especially without spewing factoids that are fun but can trivialize the grandeur of a project like this. I have to hand it to those who created  the movie “Contact” based on Carl Sagan’s novel, as the feelings I got watching that movie were very similar to those I had traveling around Kennedy Space Center; awe and astonishment of the size and complexity of a large space travel project being undertaken by mankind.

The night before the planned launch we were driven out to view the Shuttle Atlantis on the pad.  As the bus wound it’s way past the Vehicle Assembly Building, “the Crawler” (for transport to the pad which also hauled Saturn rockets for Apollo), we passed visual obstructions and the Shuttle came into view; gasps, people uttering “Oh My God”, and then a strange silence fell over those on the bus as we all took in the breathtaking view of the brightly lit Atlantis standing on it’s tail poised for launch. My eyes began to get teary, I could not help but feel proud to be an American.  I was also proud to be an Engineer. I was feeling a bit nerdy for thinking that, when Larry Ellison said quite out loud “That’s Engineering”.  Indeed.

What’s the tie in with Pillar? Well, me I guess, and hey, it’s my blog. But I will say that nearly half of Pillar’s employees are Engineers, and I am damn proud of them, and their work.

Footnote: I am very grateful to the wonderful folks at NASA who afforded us the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Center. Their professional and passionate pursuit of their mission is inspiring.

We’ve all been there before. You see something that doesn’t seem right… or that you know is not right, but hesitate to say anything about it. Especially if it’s someone we know… like a friend, family member or Customer. Well, I think sometimes there is no better way to deal with the situation than to just blurt it out.

We had a Customer who was trying to configure their data center in a way that frankly was not smart. I said, “Tell them so”. 

Of course I realize there is a natural tendency for people inside a company, especially Sales and Marketing people, to tread so carefully around a customer that they won’t tell them that what they want -- is not what they need. 

I don’t believe in the old adage “The Customer is always right”. Sure, I understand and endorse the spirit of that saying, but it isn’t always true. There comes a time when you have to say “If it were me, there is no way I would do what you’re proposing”.  And say it with conviction. And hold your ground.

You should stop short of saying, “Hey, that’s stupid”, but you should not be quiet or hide behind the drapes. Someone who is going to damage their business should be stopped. Why not? Because you might offend them? Or worse ...lose the sale?

Look, at the end of the day when you are selling stuff, you have three choices: 1) Sell the Customer what they want, 2) Sell them what you honestly believe is the best choice for them, and 3) Walk away before you become part of a situation where you know the Customer is making a serious mistake.

If a Customer is making a mistake with serious ramifications, you owe it to them, and to the company you work for to do your best to intervene, even if it means giving up the sale.

Besides – if you are committed to the Customer’s welfare – perhaps this is the only way you can get through to them – by putting your money where your mouth is.

Oh, and by the way, the technique of “just blurt it out” referenced above – Don’t try this with your spouse or significant other.  After 22 years of marriage I ended up naming a wine I make “Dog House” after such an event.

-Mike

Have you heard the rumor that we are down to our last $20 million? What about the one that says, Larry Ellison, our sole investor wants to pull the plug on us?

Must have been a Hell of a dinner our sales guys just expensed. I knew they just had a wonderful event at Storage Expo in the UK but wasn’t aware it cost that much.

Every few months it seems, some competitor starts a rumor that Pillar is broke. Such rumors seem to get stronger at the same pace as our market position strengthens. 

Let’s cut the crap.  Pillar is alive and flourishing.  We are succeeding by every measure. Rumors of our death are just old-fashioned FUD.

If Pillar were out of money, we wouldn’t be hiring. We wouldn’t be gaining in customers and sales.

I would never assume to know what Larry’s investment plans may be, but, if he decided he no longer wanted to invest in Pillar, would the logical course of action be to pull the plug on something this valuable?

I think he’s smarter than that.

Pulling the plug on Pillar would be as preposterous as the headline to this post is for Pillar.  It would be as inane as deciding, when you no longer wanted to live in a house, to bulldoze it.

A simple message to our customers and prospects: Pillar has money. It is well funded. We pay our bills.

We are going to be around for a very long time.

Over the last 5-6 years I have been asked many times why I started Pillar, especially since at the time (2001) it was not obvious that the world needed another storage company. The Yankee Group reported that year that there were about 128 storage startups. I was working then at IBM as the general manager of the OEM Subsystems business, an amalgamation of engineering teams in Tucson, a company that IBM bought (Mylex), and some labs in Yamato Japan. We were building components and systems (External RAID Controllers, Storage Shelves (Controller and JBOD), Host-bus Based RAID, NAS, and SAN subsystems). Our customers included IBM, Dell, SGI, NEC, Fujitsu-Siemens and a host of others.

After analyzing the entrenched competitors, I realized that the real competition was the big boys: EMC, IBM, HPQ, Hitachi, LSI, and NetApp. My job was to build a product and a company that could beat them.

It all came down to what customers need and could not get from any of these players. If you are at a big company, and you have 10+ million lines of legacy code which determines your hardware architecture, you know the barriers to change. Every damn thing you want to do is a big deal, and affects 20,000 people. Living under these conditions people get frustrated. They yearn for a clean sheet of paper. Embodied on the rumpled old sheets is the wisdom of many researchers, engineers, customers, and rectified mistakes. Pillar represented an opportunity to take much of that knowledge and couple it with the lessons learned and new technologies to build a better mousetrap.

Pillar was also a chance to break a business paradigm: Specifically the one that says you offer technology and advancement on a given platform in a way to protect your gross margin. Pillar was also a chance to break some long standing arguments that took on a religious tone, like NAS versus SAN (more on this in a later post).

All storage is block based, but pushing a volume manager and file system into a storage system is great for some applications. At the other end of the file system is block-based storage. There is no reason that one excludes the other, and it is possible to build both at the same time onto the same storage pool as Pillar has done.

The other day someone told me that all storage systems were the same because they all used disk drives from the same vendors. Yup. All airlines are the same because they use equipment from Boeing or Airbus or whomever. Yup, roger that. What a riot.

In the end a storage system is defined by the technologies that are applied in a particular configuration to solve the storage problem. Like airlines who use Boeing, they can differentiate themselves in many ways, right down to cashews versus peanuts.

Those differentiators have helped Pillar succeed in a competitive marketplace. This blog is my vehicle to talk to you about why we’ve made certain decisions and why we believe these are the right moves for our customers. We’re happy to take on industry issues. We have strong opinions and we can back them up. I certainly can talk technology down to the bit level, if you’d like. I enjoy a good debate and I like to win. So feel free to agree or disagree.

Let the discussion begin.