Pillar's Scalable Axiom SAN is a Top Performer for Buffini & Company in Supporting Powerful Real Estate Referral and Lead Generation Systems

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 26, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Pillar Data Systems —

News Facts

• Buffini & Company, the largest real estate coaching and training company in North America, has deployed the Pillar Axiom unified storage system   to keep pace with rapid storage growth while ensuring the highest levels of data availability.
• Thousands of real estate, lending and service industry professionals in more than 37 countries rely on Buffini & Company's training programs, including web-based tools, videos, webinars and live broadcasts, to build their businesses and increase net profits.
• As Buffini & Company's data storage requirements began doubling annually, the IT team experienced severe capacity problems with its existing direct-attached storage (DAS) solution and also encountered performance problems with its Microsoft Exchange environment. The team also grew concerned about the company's ability to support the storage requirements of 40 Microsoft Windows servers, six virtual servers running VMware ESX Server, as well as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and Great Plains software.
• According to Buffini & Company, Pillar Data Systems' unique system-wide Quality of Service ensured higher performance levels and greater flexibility to prioritize storage based on business demands, such as month-end billing, as well as faster ROI than competing platforms from EMC, Compellent and EqualLogic.

Pillar Delivers Scalable, 'Five Nines' Performance

• With Pillar, Buffini & Company has grown its storage capacity incrementally, starting with two SATA and two Fibre Channel Axiom Brick storage enclosures with 28 TBs of capacity. The company has since scaled seamlessly to more than 40 TBs of storage capacity while achieving a 10 times performance increase for Microsoft Exchange.
• According to the company, Pillar's overall architecture and fault tolerance features make an ideal platform for meeting its ever-increasing archive storage requirements while ensuring "five nines" availability in keeping with customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Buffini & Company also takes advantage of its Pillar SAN to replicate SQL backups to a non-Pillar device to accelerate disk-based recoveries, which also has elevated customer service.
• In comparing its Pillar SAN to the previous storage environment, the company ascertains that it would have cost twice as much to scale with DAS, which led to the expectation that Pillar will produce a much faster break-even point.

Supporting Quotes

From Rodney Butler, network systems manager for Buffini & Company:

• "With Pillar, we can create a profile to give a certain application priority and then change it on-the-fly, which would be really helpful in dealing with month-end billing. This enables us to control our own destiny instead of hoping the SAN would do it for us, which was the case with Compellent."
• "Installation and training were done in a day, which was much quicker than I expected. And, creating LUNs is super easy and takes about two minutes. Setting QoS profiles are equally straightforward and I've hardly ever had to call in to configure anything."
• "Pillar's support monitoring gets high marks. Before I even knew a drive had gone bad, Pillar's remote monitoring had picked up the problem and a replacement drive was shipped to me over the weekend. Pillar does such a good job of overseeing performance that I hardly spend any time managing the device."
• "Taking advantage of replicated backups on the Pillar is just another example of how this flexible and reliable technology helps us provide both our employees and hosted customers the best possible service."

Resources

About Buffini & Company

Buffini & Company is the largest real estate coaching and training company in North America. Founded by industry expert Brian Buffini, the company provides its Members with systems that facilitate the fundamentals of working by referral. Their unique and highly–effective lead generation and coaching systems have helped entrepreneurs around the world improve their business, increase net profit and enhance their quality of life. Members of Buffini & Company's One2One Coaching programs earn 6 times the NAR national average (US). Buffini & Company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California.  For further information: www.buffiniandcompany.com or 800-945-3485 x 2146.

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.

SOURCE Pillar Data Systems