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Pillar towers over rivals in best value storage

The man from the SPC, he say yes

To get the most bang for your storage buck, you should buy a Pillar Data Axiom 600 - according to the Storage Performance Council (SPC).

The SPC-1 benchmark measures the IOPS performance of storage arrays and the cost per IOPS, both in a standard way so that different vendors' storage products can be compared. Pillar Data has submitted an Axiom 600 array to this benchmark and achieved a record cost/IOPS value of $8.79, but not a record IOPS number.

Its score of 64,992.77 IOPS beat products from EMC (Clariion submitted cheekily by NetApp at 24,997.49), IBM (DS-5300 at 58,158.69), NetApp (FAS 3170 at 60,515.34), and HP (EVA 2C12D at 20,096.97) but failed to beat products from 3PAR (T800 at 224,989.65), HP (XP24000 at 200,245.73) and HDS (USP V at 200,245.73).

However, the cheapest of these last three is the 3PAR, and its T800 cost $2,091,667 and had more than 1,200 disk drives in its configuration. The HP and HDS product configurations each cost over $3.5m.

Pillar's Axiom 600 SPC-1 configuration cost almost a quarter of the 3PAR product, $570,972.87. Mike Workman, Pillar's CEO, suggests that an Axiom with 1,200 spindles might achieve 260,000 plus IOPS in the benchmark. Real world storage mileage is bound to vary, of course, a point that EMC uses to justify its refusal to take part in SPC-1 or other storage benchmarks, claiming that SPC-1 comparisons may be logically coherent but they don't say anything meaningful enough about real world performance. ®

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