Hi Luther

I can speak with experience on working with Pillar Data. Back in May 05 I started looking into a SAN/NAS solution for my company. Having worked with both EMC and NetApp's in prior lives I had a pretty good idea on what each of them could bring to the table, but since I currently work for a small startup, big expenditures like disk arrays HAVE to be methodically laid out. So, I had to start my search from the ground up.

For starters I spent the week down at the Storage world conf down in Long Beach and talked to about 75 different vendors. looking into both SATA and FC disk arrays, iSCSI, NAS, traditional FC SAN, etc.

The sum of that foray was I was able to narrow the pack down to about 5 "interesting" vendors. after a few post conference meetings, the list was quickly narrowed down to 3 vendors. EMC, NetApp and Pillar Data.

BTW non negotiable requirements were:

System must be able to do:

NAS and SAN

Easily expandable

Easily managed

World class support

Cost effective

I won't bore you with the details but. in a nut shell, objectively ALL three were excellent candidates (email me if you want to discuss my objective opinions of all three choices, as each one of the vendors were good)

Bottom line when it came to putting my John Hancock on a sales PO I went with NetApp. REASONS:.

1. Interestingly this was the first time that both EMC and NetApp had gone head to head with a customer that was seriously considering Pillar Data. (something I'm sure that is more common today). In any event, because of this, its my opinion that both of them were "pulling out all the stops" as far as pricing was concerned. Naturally this worked out good for me =:-) and as expected Pillar kept throwing more and more into the pot. so much that I was ready to sign a PO with Pillar. But. literally at the 11 hour (and 59th minutes) NetApp "made me an offer I couldn't refuse" 2. Irrespective of the dollar sacrifice all three vendors were making I have to admit that Pillars offerings were VERY interesting. Pillar has an interesting advantage of starting from scratch in designing their disk arrays with "today's technology" where as most "established vendors are using years, almost decades old technology. that has been "upgraded over the years" so here I say advantage Pillar Data for being innovative. This is not to say that EMC or NetApp are not innovative. its just a different perspective if you get what I mean. but with newness comes uncertainty and that concerned me. 3. Which leads me to my number one concern with Pillar:

Newness of the product. I believe I would have been one of the first "real sales" they made..sure they touted all the "big shops" that had gazillions of terabytes of data sitting on Pillar Axioms. but I'd bet a dollar that these were test boxes that folks were "kicking the tires" on. Bottom line, I didn't feel 100% comfortable putting my job on the line with a product that was that "wet"

Now, 7 months later. if I was going to buy another disk array #2 and #3 might not be as big a deterrent, and I might end up with a Pillar system. maybe.

Bottom line. I think EMC and NetApp have the first "real contender" to their domains EMC with SAN and NetApp with NAS. but what the real test will be is how eagerly the rest of the industry accepts. yet another disk mfg.

Just my .02

KEN

Ken Nishikawa

Director of IT/Operations

KeepMedia, Inc.

275 Shoreline Drive, Suite 650

Redwood Shores, CA 94065

(650) 587-7031 Voice

(650) 587-7001 Fax

knishikawa@keepmedia.com

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Luther Allin Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 6:10 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Replacing OUR NetApp

I'm liking the thread that John Stewart started about his filer replacement, so I decided to start my own.

We too are faced with replacing our NetApp filers this year. We have and F720 (cifs file shares) and an F810 (cifs and iscsi). Both of these filers are maxed out both in disk space and processor. We had NetApp come up with a solution for us to replace these and the proposal is attractive. They put together a 3020 system for us that should meet both of our storage and processing needs for at least the next 2 years. So we budgeted for the replacement. Then the unthinkable happened...

My boss received a postcard from a company called Pillar Data. He brought the postcard to me and said, "we should look at what these guys have." The rest is history. For those of you not familiar with Pillar Data, it's a startup of Larry Ellison's (the ORACLE Larry Ellison.) They have a really neat product, and their QOS is quite impressive. But I don't think that their product is mature enough yet for prime time. After spending some time with their engineers and traveling to the Enterprise Technology Center in Atlanta to demo one of these solutions, I found some chinks in their armor. I won't go into the details here, but if anyone wants to know what I've learned about them, I'll be happy to share that information.

So this leads me to my question. Has anyone heard of Pillar Data and if so I was wondering if you shared my opinion (or not) of their product? I want to stick with the NetApp solution that was proposed, so I'm looking for ammunition to back up my argument.

Cheers.

Luther L. Allin IV, MCSE, ICSA Network Systems Engineer Miller http://www.millermartin.com/ & Martin PLLC 832 Georgia Avenue, Suite 1000 Chattanooga, TN 37402 lallin@millermartin.com (423) 785-8381 (Direct) (423) 321-1678 (Fax) Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville

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