Features

Lower Cost of Storage Management Across Database Infrastructure

The Pillar Axiom storage system is the ideal storage platform for Oracle Grid computing environments. Oracle and Pillar Data Systems™ share a similar approach to lowering cost through use of commodity components combined with intelligent software to provide scalable, high-performance, highly available resources that which are easy to manage. The shared storage pool provided by the Pillar Axiom storage system is complementary with the Oracle GRID technologies (RAC, ASM and Grid Control). Together, Oracle and Pillar help customers increase their business agility while lowering their acquisition and management costs. Pillar Data Systems has been a member of the Oracle Partner network since 2003 and the Pillar Axiom is fully compatible with Oracle 9i RAC and 10g. View a brochure about the Pillar and Oracle GRID demonstration

The Pillar Axiom includes a plug-in that provides complete availability, performance, and configuration information, consolidating all storage-monitoring information in the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Grid Control Console. Simplify storage management to the point where an Oracle DBA can take on a role normally assigned to a storage administrator.

• Gather statistical data about application storage and perform comprehensive root-cause analysis to diagnose storage-related problems.
• Takes advantage of “alert” features in OEM so storage issues can be addressed proactively.
• Provision, monitor, and manage data on the Axiom and use the features of Oracle’s Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) feature of Oracle11g
• Access ASM’s load-balancing features across multiple systems to allow you to scale your Pillar Axiom infrastructure infinitely.
• Use the policies inside Grid Control to manage storage through a single, familiar interface that you already use.

Designed for Oracle 10g Grid, Pillar and Oracle Services have created a solution that unleashes the power of high-performance storage at true commodity pricing at a lower total cost of ownership.

This Accelerator solution delivers Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM)-ready policies that align your service levels to Dynamic Performance metrics with Oracle Automatic Storage Management. Maximize your return on investment well beyond the initial acquisition cost of acquiring your physical storage.

Thin Provisioning For Industry-Best Utilization Rates

With the Pillar Axiom you can consolidate multiple applications and data sets in a single, multi-tenancy array while allowing administrators to assign a dynamic quality of service to each virtual volume.  Pillar’s approach allows you to provide sparse file systems and LUNs in support of the unique needs of each application. This practice of thin provisioning is recognized in the industry as a critical approach to simplifying storage management while drastically improving storage capacity utilization.

And the Pillar Axiom is easy to configure, setting profiles that will automatically adjust based on the priority that you set for your data sets. Your mission-critical databases will get the preferred attention they need, while your archive data will remain available as needed.

Pillar’s approach to thin provisioning moves beyond the traditional practice of allocating storage—a practice that ultimately reduces utilization and “strands” disk space and leaves it unused. This means you can see utilization rates soar up to 80% or even more.

1MB-Stripe Writes For Optimal ASM Support

The Axiom delivers higher throughput by allowing Oracle write operations to occur in 1MB stripes, the making Axiom the best choice for supporting Oracle's Automatic Storage Manager, which writes in 1MB sized stripes.

Writing contiguous blocks of data in 1MB stripes overcome the random access limitations of SATA, drastically reducing latency and increasing performance. In fact, the more I/O-intensive your applications are, such as batch reporting or data warehouse writes, the more benefit you will see.

Modularly Scalable Platform Enables Easy Expansion

Storage administrators who support Oracle are often burdened by steep storage system acquisition costs and even steeper software licensing costs. Pillar’s unique architecture allows you to scale as you storage needs grow by independently scaling performance and capacity up to 830TB of raw capacity. And scaling is easy – just add the drive, apply a profile, and let the Axiom integrate it into the pool—even when you add SATA drives to a fibre channel pool. No other storage vendor can boast increased capacity, increased utilization, and consistent performance at the same time. The Pillar Axiom achieves this affordability due to:

• Provides modular SAN, (FC and iSCSI) NAS and fixed content storage
• Independent scale of performance and capacity
• We  use SATA drives while delivering fibre-channel performance
• Fibre channel and SATA drives can easily combine into a single storage pool
• Off-the-shelf components are customer-replaceable
• A system wide one-time license is paid just once – no matter how often or how far you scale.

Policy-based dynamic performance, set with an intuitive graphical interface (GUI), allows you to guarantee Service Levels to important applications and still keeping storage utilization high in database deployments or development environments.

Built-in Serviceability

Being the best storage system in the industry does not make it hard to manage. When you add new volumes to your Pillar Axiom system, it can be deployed in just six clicks. The drives have a remote “call home”  feature to alert the administrator of issues before they become problems, and in the event of disk failure, the units are customer-replaceable—reducing or even eliminating expensive service calls.

Following best practices should be the rule rather than the exception, yet all too often Oracle DBAs end up battling for disk space and performance. For DBAs who want to break this cycle and follow a best-practice approach, the Pillar Axiom Storage system from Pillar Data Systems™ is the ideal storage solution. Oracle Database 10g environment best-practices increase flexibility and utilization of IT data assets.

The Axiom system complements these capabilities by addressing the limitations of traditional data storage such as dedicated, underutilized hardware and complex management tools.

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Pooled RAID 10 to Improve Write Throughput

RAID 10 is a performance enhancement for work loads with heavy random-writes, such as OLTP (online transaction processing). Pooled RAID 10 can be set on a LUN by LUN basis and does not require that an entire Brick be either RAID5 or RAID10. With RAID 10, you can expect your OLTP applications to have improved write throughput by as much as 50% compared to RAID 5 configurations. And you can achieve this improvement with lower cost SATA drives instead of fibre channel. 

And in the case of disk rebuilds for disaster recovery, Pillar’s Accelerated Drive Rebuild feature can cut your recovery time in half.

AxiomONE Software For Power and Ease of Management

AxiomONE™ software is an integrated software suite designed exclusively for the Pillar Axiom platform that allows customers to simplify complexity and reduce the cost of managing information.

It enables a simple-to-manage, highly available, uniquely scalable storage solution. Click here to read more about AxiomONE software