Caltrol Drives Down Storage TCO by 60 Percent, Boosts Application Performance with Pillar Data Systems

Improved Performance and Management Allows IT Staff to Focus More on Growing
Business, Less on Managing Storage
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(Business Wire)--
Employee-owned Caltrol selected the Axiom from Pillar Data Systems as its
storage platform to significantly lower storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
and increase application performance. Caltrol recently completed a major
virtualization project, which resulted in a 60 percent decrease in storage
infrastructure expenditures and a 20 percent reduction in data center power
consumption. Caltrol also significantly increased application performance with
the Application Aware capabilities of the Pillar Axiom.

Tweet This: Process Management Company cuts energy costs by 20%, lowers overall
TCO with @PillarData http://bit.ly/351wxM

The IT department at Caltrol, a process management and automation company,
serves the needs of the company`s eight offices, handling all customer orders,
purchase orders, enterprise resource planning (ERP), Microsoft Exchange and
file-sharing systems. When the company was forced to replace a key server in its
legacy infrastructure after it failed, Caltrol lost 30 days of data with no way
to restore it and forced employees to re-enter purchase orders to recreate the
data. The total loss amounted to about $1 million. With the goal of implementing
a robust disaster recovery system, the company looked at HP`s LeftHand systems
as well as solutions from Dell, NetApp and Pillar Data Systems.

"We didn`t have an endless budget for a storage system, so we thought we were
going to have to make some trade-offs," said Steve Murphy, IT Director for
Caltrol. "We never expected to achieve the easy scalability we have now, and we
were blown away by the high level of performance that the Axiom delivered."

An unexpected benefit for Caltrol was the "set it and forget" management
capabilities of Pillar`s AxiomONE software, which was ideal for the four-person
IT department. The intuitive management interface makes it easy for users to
guarantee a minimum level of application performance and allow multiple tiers of
data and applications to be stored on a single system with no performance
degradation.

"With the Axiom`s built-in QoS functionality, we could control the system with
as much or as little detail as we needed. The other products we evaluated
couldn`t do that," said Murphy. "The time savings are worth almost more than the
tens of thousands of dollars we saved on hardware costs. We`ve also dramatically
reduced the time our staff is required to spend on managing our storage software
system, allowing us to concentrate on expanding our business, and that`s far
more than we had ever hoped to accomplish at this stage."

Based on the successful return on investment and ease of use of the Axiom,
Caltrol is now evaluating a paperless initiative.

"Common feedback from customers is that they didn`t expect the ease of
management and scalability inherent in the Axiom," said Bob Maness, Vice
President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. "Combine
that with the stellar application and database performance and you get a company
like Caltrol who can now embark on new business endeavors because they`ve just
freed up valuable time and resources."

The Pillar Axiom`s Application Aware storage differentiates performance based on
application priority and can dramatically reduce floor space, energy demands and
storage TCO.

About Pillar Data Systems

Founded in 2001, Pillar Data Systems develops Application-Aware Storage systems
for midsize and enterprise organizations. With the highest utilization rates in
the storage industry, the Pillar Axiom solution is the most efficient storage
system on the market today. The Pillar Axiom cuts administrative time and total
cost of ownership by more than 50 percent as well as provides the only storage
system that can differentiate services based on application priority. Designed
from the ground up as the only true Application-Aware Storage system, the Pillar
Axiom allows users to match multiple application characteristics to the
appropriate service levels within a single storage platform. Pillar Data Systems
is privately funded by Tako Ventures, LLC, the venture arm of Larry Ellison.

The company is headquartered at 2840 Junction Avenue, San Jose, California
95134. The company can be reached on the Web at http://www.pillardata.com, by
phone at 408-503-4000 or by email at sales@pillardata.com.

Pillar Data Systems
Chris Drago, Sr. Director of Corporate Communications
408-518-4636
cdrago@pillardata.com
or
Lois Paul & Partners
Don Jennings, 781-782-5756
don_jennings@lpp.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009