Pillar Data is the first manufacturer to incorporate 2TB SATA drives in its arrays, doubling the Axiom product's capacity.

CEO Mike Workman says the firm is using Western Digital's 5400rpm 2TB drive. Pillar was also the first array manufacturer to use 1TB drives, which came from Hitachi GST. Array subsystem manufacturer Xyratex qualified 2TB drives recently, for its OEM customers, but Pillar is the first to ship them to end users.

An all-SATA Axiom 600 could previously scale to 832TB; it can now grow to 1.624PB with the 2TB drives. Customers get twice as much data per drive and lower power consumption per GB. Workman blogs: "If we moved 50,000 PB stored on 1TB disk to half the number of 2TB spindles, we could save the world more than $100M a year in energy costs."

We're in a 2TB transition time and can expect other array manufacturers to fairly quickly follow Pillar's lead. ®

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