The Ten Pillars of Business Continuance

No longer a luxury for Fortune 1000 companies alone, business continuance is a business imperative
for most organizations. Successful business continuance requires that data is reliably backed up and
available. In addition, government regulations mandate specific levels of data backup and restoration,
adding new requirements to corporate data availability. These conditions require that data administra-
tors develop business continuance processes that are very fast and reliable while accommodating bud-
get constraints, allowing for data growth, and minimizing complexity. The Pillar Axiom® is the system
of choice for business continuance applications:

1 Consolidation – Optimizing Your Infrastructure

At the foundation of any business continuance strategy is an infrastructure that improves uptime and
is easy to manage. Consolidating multiple applications and data tiers – including primary and backup
storage – onto a single high-utilization/high-capacity Pillar Axiom storage system reduces complexity
and saves time, effort, and education cost. Why buy and maintain multiple storage systems when one
consolidated system can do it all?

2 Application-Aware Storage – Fulfilling the Demands of Your Services

Differentiating between the service levels for your data and applications allows you to focus the right
business continuance services based on data criticality, age, or other factors. Pillar’s unique Quality of
Service (QoS) for storage allows you to automatically deliver performance on demand, aligning the
resources in your system with the criticality of the data – all in a single storage system or networked
solution.

3 Disk-to-Disk Backup – Closing the Backup Windows

A solid backup plan is an important part of any business continuance strategy – but you must use a
backup method that doesn’t create downtime or interrupt availability, yet is easy to implement and
assures reliable restorations. With disk-to-disk backup using AxiomONE® File Replicator on the Pillar
Axiom, your backup window will be nearly eliminated, and because disk access is non-sequential, your
restorations will shrink from days to mere minutes.

4 Robust Performance – Keeping Continuance Processes Free of Bottlenecks

Backups, restorations, and archive creation will quickly become a hindrance if they impact overall
system performance. With individual RAID controllers for each incremental disk enclosure and up to
four data movers (Slammers) in each Pillar Axiom system, your system can stick to business as usual
while backups and other business continuance functions operate in the background – without creating
a bottleneck.
5 Manageability – Simplifying Complex Infrastructures
Especially with today’s more stringent data-retention and pin-point retrieval requirements, the manage-
ment of storage infrastructures can be a major undertaking. Pillar Axiom is designed to be easy to use.
With its intuitive management user interface, you free up administrators to focus on more proactive or
critical tasks while you reduce licensing and training costs.

6 Virtual Tape Library – Integrating Legacy Archives into Today’s System

To minimize the impact on the existing backup infrastructure, administrators sometimes need to include
legacy tape archives with their disk-based backup systems. Pillar partnered with a leading virtual tape
library (VTL) vendor to make the Pillar Axiom configurable as a VTL. When combined with the affordability,
scalability, performance, and multi-hosting benefits of the Axiom, this provides a compelling solution for
end users with a large investment in their existing tape-based system.

7 Scalability & Availability – Infrastructure that Keeps Up with Your Business

A huge benefit of the Pillar Axiom system is its ability to scale easily. Axiom allows you to scale both I/O
bandwidth, performance and capacity in a predictable and simple manner. The architecture of the Pillar
Axiom makes it easy to create solutions with 24/7 availability. The Pillar Axiom is designed with high
availability in mind, so every part is redundant with no single point of failure. If required, Pillar can help
further protect your systems using Continuous Data Protection or Continuous Data Replication to mirror
environments across separate arrays locally, remotely or both.

8 Disaster Recovery – Relying on the Best So You’ll be Ready for the Worst
Pillar Data Systems offers disaster recovery (DR) solutions that ensure rapid recovery from site failures
while remaining cost-effective, highly scalable, and easy to deploy and manage. The Pillar Axiom is
heterogeneous and supports SAN and NAS systems, so it can take the place of multiple DR assets both
at the primary and remote sites, acting as a replication target for many different arrays. And with the
scalability and flexibility of the Pillar Axiom, DR coverage can rapidly move beyond the protection of
mission-critical data to include e-mail and file sharing. It can provide you with the growth potential you
need to accommodate dynamic DR capacity needs.

9 Remote Data Protection – Managing Remote Data as if it is Local

Central policy-based backups from all your offices gives you the control you need to ensure that
appropriate data protection is in place. But relying on personnel in distant offices to set up equipment
or initiate processes can reduce the reliability of including remote offices in your business continuance
plans. Automated “lights-out” backups are performed reliably and consistently on the Pillar Axiom using
AxiomONE File Replicator, with features such as WAN network bandwidth utilization and security and
data integrity safeguards. This system transfers and guarantees a second copy of remote data in a
central hub or data center – whether you have three offices, or three thousand.

10 Eco-Friendly – The World’s Most Efficient Storage System

Consolidation onto high-utilization storage systems reduces the amount of physical hardware in a data
center, resulting in lower power and cooling costs and producing a smaller carbon footprint. You can
operate your data center cost effectively as well as ecologically because of superior utilization of the disk
space, multi-tiering, and multi-protocol ability in conjunction with thin provisioning. Pillar Axiom has set
the standard for green storage and is the world’s most efficient storage system.

Pillar Data Systems takes a sensible, customer-centric approach to networked storage. We started with a simple, yet powerful idea:
Build a successful storage company by creating value that others had promised, but never produced. At Pillar, we’re delivering
the most cost-effective, highly available networked storage solutions on the market. We build reliable, flexible solutions
that, for the first time, seamlessly unite SAN with NAS and enable multiple tiers of storage on a single platform. In the end, we
created an entirely new class of storage.

For more information, visit www.pillardata.com or call 877.252.3706

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are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pillar Data Systems. Other company and product names may be
trademarks of their respective owners. Specifications are subject to change without notice. 10P-BC-0108