Apparently it's the name of his dog, not the shellfish :D

http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/23/smbusiness/playing_with_fire.fsb/index.htm

We've got ~40TB on a NAS Pillar, and we're using it to serve everything from mail via Cyrus (lots of small files, mostly read) through home directories and Clearcase up to Oracle. The QoS stuff they offer does what it says on the tin, clamping the ability of the people that didn't pay for the box to impact on the people that did, and giving everyone predictable performance. There's a few matters of taste (for example, rather like contended DSL when there are few users, giving low priority users the whole system when no-one else is using it doesn't manage their expectations very well, so it would be nice to clamp their performance even when there's plenty spare) but the box basically does what it say on the tin.

Throw in stone-reliable hardware and a software architecture which means that problems --- and you don't buy startup NAS hardware without expecting and tolerating a few of those --- simply trigger a second or so of failover delay and it's a sound product. And well priced, too.

I'm fairly hard-bitten with NAS products, having been using NFS as my dominant storage technology since 1986. I've run Auspexes and NetApps, along with Sun on the front of EMC, Datacore and other hip buzzwords. But the Pillar has been at least as good as the best of the rest, and in terms of having one vendor to deal with for the whole stack harkens back to the heyday of Auspex (not surprising, given the number of Auspex alumni at Pillar, and standing an Axion next to an NS6000 is a hoot).

"They can also make temporary changes to performance criteria on-the-fly for short term bumps such as discovery or data mining."

In a Pioneer XXXXPlorer, would such "short term bumps" become a steady Stream of More Candy for Discoveries in Data/MetaDataMining which would then QuITe Naturally and Spntaneously Generate Production of Product to MetaDataMine. IT would Create .

And I'll just say that again, only this time, a little Louder ..... IT CREATES.