Pillar unveils SSD Bricks

Two days back, Pillar announced the availability of SSD Bricks for its Axiom Storage Array. SSD bricks will be available for purchase by the month of June. It is under beta testing with three vendors.

SSD Bricks in Axiom allows adding a fifth storage tier, Tier 0, to say appropriately. These SSD bricks are backed by the Pillar’s QoS which offers the selection of different profiles and priorities for the applications that are attached to Axiom.

SSD Bricks includes 12 SSD Drives of 64 GB SATA SSDs. Pillar’s Axiom arrays are built using a combination of “brick” capacity nodes and “slammer” compute nodes that scale performance and capacity independently. Like standard Axiom Bricks, the SSD Bricks will include Pillar’s unique Distributed RAID technology that allows for easy and rapid scalability with no performance degradation. These new Bricks are backed by Pillar’s written utilization and performance guarantees.

Pillar’s Press release is here

Storage Investments Remain Resilient

A recent survey covering planned expenditures across 26 technology catagories was conducted by Millward Brown, Research International, and Lightspeed Research collaborate with LinkedIn uncovers that only ”Data Storage” is the technology to see increased spending this year. This survey reveals that Virtualization is the next key trend that will impact the industry.

This survey was conducted among LinkedIn members who were IT Professionals. 450 of them from US and UK participated in this survey. While overall spending on Storage was only expected to increase by a marginal amount (less then 1%), this is in stark contrast to other hardware categories which showed declines between 2-3%. When asked about the key challenges facing them in the coming year, technology decision makers cited ”meeting the same or similar objectives with lower IT budgets,”

To read the complete report visit here.

http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/MillwardBrown/Content/News/PressReleaseView.aspx?id=/20090303_StorageInvestmentsRemainResilient