"Xiotech had a good easy interface to carve out space, so we didn't want to get into this complicated system for administration," Burnley says. "And we didn't, because the Pillar system is also easy. The EMC and HP interfaces were not as easy to learn."
As a Xiotech customer, MSP was not averse to buying from smaller vendors. Still, it took some convincing from Pillar with its talk of slammers (controllers), bricks (disk enclosures), and software that places data on disk according to how frequently it's accessed. Also, Burnley had his reservations about SATA drives, which are the only type Pillar offers.
"We were used to Fibre Channel drives, and moving to SATA drives was a leap of faith for us," he says. "Pillar told us how their software would arrange data on a disk in a way that gained significant speed. But we had the mentality that Fibre Channel's the best, and you can't get faster than a Fibre Channel drive. So we were skeptical."
Burnley says once his team began running performance tests, they noticed significant speed increases. We put Pillar through the wringer during testing," he says. "We are a transaction-based business. We need speed to stay ahead of the curve.
Burnley also liked Pillar's price tag, both for the initial system and for upgrades. He says MSP paid Pillar $95,000 for a 12-Tbyte system two 16-port Brocade switches. "And if I need more space, I make a phone call, buy a brick, pop it in, and it's ready to be provisioned," he says. "No licenses, none of that stuff. With the other vendors you have to pay licenses on top of the cost of the hard drive."
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