Many companies managing large-scale email environments - those with multiple (clustered) servers, with several terabytes of content, and with a broad mix of main office, remote office and mobile users—find they can no longer manage this technology despite their often huge investment in assets and personnel. Frequently, the cause of this impasse comes from trying to manage their new, more-demanding messaging systems by using techniques that were already showing their age during 1990’s. Nowhere is this more evident than when companies try to support key systems with direct-attach storage. The limitations of direct-attach storage in enterprise datacenters are well documented: most significantly, such topologies do not scale efficiently and cannot be managed except in the most fragmented and sub-optimized fashion.

This white paper looks at the problems associated with direct-attach storage in an enterprise messaging setting, and at Axiom, a solution from Pillar Data Systems that Enterprise Management Associates sees as providing a useful and efficient remedy to one of the most important reliability and efficiency problems within the modern enterprise datacenter.