From green to virtualization, the storage industry saw many new trends emerge and blossom in 2007. Pillar Data Systems, a leading provider of enterprise network storage systems, was at the forefront of these trends, while maintaining its leadership in innovation and service for its growing worldwide customer base.

In 2007, Pillar brought several new executives on board, including Bob Maness, vice president of marketing; David Zimmer, vice president of worldwide channel sales; and Curtis Wittich, vice president of worldwide sales; and promoted Nancy Holleran to president. With its new management team in place, the company is executing on its plan to deliver innovative storage solutions, while lowering total cost of ownership for its customers. Due to its strong customer commitment, 2007 was also the year Pillar was able to showcase its 200th client - Virgin Games. The company closed 2007 with more than 300 worldwide customers.

Additionally, Pillar achieved several significant milestones for 2007 including:

• Significant revenue growth from the previous year
• An increase of its indirect channel business to nearly 70 percent of total revenues
• Continued investment in the award-winning Axiom platform, bringing new features/functionality to market
• First to market disk drive technologies as they became market available – 750GB, 1TB SATA disk drives, 300GB FC drive
• Geographic expansion into three new regions of Europe (Southern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe) and Asia/Pacific with a May Japan launch
• Introduced a new set of professional services offerings, the Pillar Pulse suite of services
• Industry leadership in overall disk utilization (both written data and allocated space), increasing the overall efficiency and value of a storage subsystem
• Continued leadership in the unified storage platform market
• Introduced a new CEO blog, providing insightful, candid perspectives on the storage industry

Delivering on the Efficiency Promise
In addition to announcing the Efficiency Quotient earlier this year, which sets the industry benchmark for evaluating data storage efficiencies, 2007 also marked the second year of shipping the Pillar Axiom system. As part of many organizations’ goals to achieve better efficiency levels, customers have chosen to deploy the Axiom to unite SAN and NAS and consolidate multiple tiers of storage on a single platform to enable the utmost in storage efficiency. The cost savings and efficiency gains of those who have deployed the Pillar Axiom are unrivaled by competitive systems, and many have touted its benefits, including 75 percent savings on energy costs.

“We have been working with Pillar for a couple of years now and not only has the company met our storage needs, but it continues to exceed them,” said Vince Delperdang, IT manager, O’Donnell/Akins. “Since adding the Axiom system, we have been able to scale our system as we grow. The beauty of it is that we are able to store more information in less space, which allows us to keep our overall operational costs at a minimum. The Axiom is an efficient, flexible, reliable storage system that keeps our business operations up while it drives our environmental costs down.”

“What separates Pillar from other vendors is its commitment to driving true efficiencies for its customers,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, The Taneja Group. “During the past year, Pillar has made significant strides in raising utilization rates for its customers, as the Axiom storage system is one of the most efficient disk systems on the market today. By driving utilization rates so high without suffering performance losses, Pillar customers are deriving maximum value out of their storage investments.”

As part of a year of many firsts for the company, Pillar was one of the first organizations to join the Green Grid, a consortium that drives the IT industry forward in delivering more efficient technologies to help lower energy and space costs and improve data center efficiencies. Additionally, as one of the first vendors to offer 1TB SATA drives, end users experienced even greater savings when deploying the Axiom with this drive space. Pillar Axiom users on average have seen industry-leading, 62-percent written disk utilization, and one third of those customers are utilizing more than 80 percent of their disk array resources.