Flexibility, lower cost key to Pillar Data storage model

LONGMONT — A local company has restructured to build a new data storage model that is expected to be more flexible and operate at substantially lower costs.

Digital Appliance is undergoing a name change to Pillar Data Systems, said Kim Kershenstein, senior director of engineering.

?We are building storage systems and trying to solve some inherent problems with storage. We’re going to be a manufacturing company and will provide a product with both hardware and software,? he said.

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The company’s new data storage product will offer many automated features and policy driven management, Kershenstein said. ?It will permit fewer people to maintain a larger amount of storage, so as customers increase storage, they won’t have to increase head count..?

Digital Appliance was started about six years ago in Israel, funded by Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corp.

?They were trying to build a distributed file system. They had partial success with it, and then last summer Ellison decided he wanted to enter full-scale into the storage business,? Kershenstein said.

Ellison contacted Mike Workman, now the company’s CEO, to look around and consider options. Workman has spent his career breaking new technical ground. In his 20 years in the storage business, he has worked for IBM and other major corporations. He holds more than 15 technology patents.

?He decided there was a lot wrong with the current storage model out in the industry,? Kershenstein said.

Consequently, the company is actually a ?re-start of a start-up,? he said.

Pillar Data Systems is principally headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., and has

offices in Longmont and in Israel. ?The bulk of the people are in Milpitas. We’re a fairly small operation in Longmont,? Kershenstein said.

Kershenstein joined the company at the end of January. The company moved into its present facility in Longmont in March. It now has 20 employees, and is expected to grow to more than 50 employees in the next year, he said. Another 80 people work in Milpitas.

The Longmont site focuses strictly on software engineering, while the Milpitas site concentrates on hardware and software engineering, Kershenstein said.

?Both groups will develop the new product. Longmont will manage both the user interface and policies. We have responsibilities for all policy-driven management and some lower level pieces.?

Pillar’s new product is expected to be on the market by the fourth quarter of 2003, although Kershenstein said it may be released sooner.

In the old model of data storage, the customer was hooked up to a server, and the server had to be shut down to add more storage to it.

?There was a lot wrong with that. First of all, you had down time. It doesn’t allow you to share storage resources across the company,? Kershenstein said. ?It becomes very expensive because storage is a resource.?

Only a fresh approach to storage will provide answers to key issues of security, reliability, scalability and cost of ownership, he said.

While there has been some initiative to change the model by creating storage area networks, these have been competing technologies that haven’t coexisted very well, he said. ?We’re making it so it can coexist,? he said.

Currently, the company is in the design phase of development. ?Our hardware is a little farther along. We’re starting construction on our software and pieces right now,? he said.

He declined to disclose the start-up costs for the company. Pillar is owned by Lawrence Investments, controlled by Larry Ellison, and is privately held.