The Larry Ellison-backed storage vendor Pillar Data Systems is releasing the next generation of its Axiom system designed to provide high disk utilization rates and optimal performance for VMware, Oracle database and Microsoft Exchange applications.

The Axiom 600 for both storage-area network and network-attached storage systems, announced on Tuesday, nearly doubles the number of applications a customer can throw at any given storage controller, says CEO Michael Workman, who co-founded Pillar with Oracle CEO Ellison in 2001. (Compare storage products.)  

Workman and Ellison set out to build storage that is "application-aware," which knows and can respond to the unique requirements of specific applications. Some applications have to be optimized for speed, and others for capacity, Workman says. Axiom can dynamically reassign resources based on changing priorities.

The other major goal of Pillar is to drive up disk utilization rates. Enterprises commonly buy more storage than is necessary in order to boost speed as measured in Input/Output operations Per Second (IOPS), and end up using only a fraction of their disk space.

Pillar boosts utilization rates by providing up to eight RAID controllers for each storage pool, according to Workman.

With storage systems from EMC, HP, IBM, Hitachi and others, you get two controllers per box, says analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. The advantage with Pillar is the "ability to add controllers when I need it, and the ability to add capacity when I need it," he says.

A typical Pillar customer uses 60% of its disk space, many run above 80%, and a few brave IT shops use every last bit of storage they have, according to Workman.

"We have customers at 100% utilization today. Frankly, they’re driving me nuts," he says. "You don’t want to run any storage system from anybody near 100% because as soon as the system is full, it's really full. That's not a good position to be in, when you go to write bytes, and the system comes back and says 'I’m sorry.'"

Axiom 600 and Axiom 600MC (Mission Critical), the successors to the Axiom 500 product line, are a mixture of hardware and software and are available immediately. A typical configuration for a low-end customer would cost about $80,000, compared with $67,000 for the 500 series, Workman says.