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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (4791)	9/16/2005 3:05:40 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

Pillar's Axiom itarchitect.com <<...Large and established storage vendors, such as EMC, HP, and Hitachi, dominate the midrange storage market and offer a variety of packages for different purposes. EMC, for instance, has 11 hardware platforms and dozens of software options. To buy storage for an archive and an Exchange directory server would mean purchasing two separate software licenses and two sets of equipment. Network Appliance, Xiotech, EqualLogic, and others sell NAS and SAN products that are priced in Axiom's range. Some sell gateways that add NAS to a SAN infrastructure, but according to Pillar this adds more cost and complexity, which takes away from NAS's advantage of being cheap and easy. Pillar's unique selling proposition is that it's the only product of its class that can handle many tiers of storage on one platform, with no additional software charges. Pillar does have some start-up angst to deal with, however. Being a newcomer in the storage market is a challenge--people who buy storage often take a conservative approach and want to be sure that a company won't fail or get bought. On the other hand, EMC and Network Appliance were both start-ups once. And Pillar isn't all that new actually. The company was started in August 2001, when Larry Ellison of Oracle asked Pillar's current president and CEO Michael Workman, who was then working at IBM, to start a storage company. One of Ellison's private investment firms, Tako Ventures, funds the company, and so far Tako has spent $150 million on it. Ironically, Oracle isn't a Pillar customer yet, but Workman deftly counters that concern: "A Fortune 500 company takes anywhere from three months to a year to qualify a new storage vendor," he says. "We have our work cut out for us, but I'm confident that we'll win business at Oracle." Pillar intends to roll out point releases for Axiom every three months. The current project is to have FC drives and enclosures for high-performance storage available by the end of 2005. In the first quarter of next year, Pillar will roll out a WORM storage component to Axiom to handle compliance needs (some regulations require that data be stored in an inerasable, unchangeable way for a predetermined number of years). It also plans to have an iSCSI option in the first quarter. In the second quarter of 2006, Pillar plans to add new replication and data migration features, as well as a standard API for integration with other storage products. In 2007 and beyond, the company hopes to build larger storage solutions that reach the broader storage market...>>