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Pillar's Power Pitch: Page 2 of 3

"I have to be honest -- I don't understand Pillar's power metric, but then again I have never been very good with Pillar math," writes 3PAR VP of marketing Craig Nunes, in an email. "First of all, our industry relies on most of the same vendors for disk drive technology. Therefore it is difficult to make a case that one array vendor's disk drives are more or less power-efficient than another's." Nunes has his own power axe to grind. (See Power Problems Plague Users.)

"The best strategy for energy efficiency is to simply eliminate the allocated but unused capacity with thin provisioning... No complex equations are required," he states.

EMC didn't have an answer, just more questions. "How are they comparing this to the CLARiiON CX3-40 when customers can customize the number of drives, the drive types/density? How are Pillar's IOPs measured?" demanded EMC spokeswoman Hadley Weinzierl.

Unfortunately, we're not really sure. Pillar admits its metric isn't quite scientific. But that's not stopping the vendor's execs from peddling their "green financial reasoning."

And so another marketing bandwagon lurches on...