The most valuable features are the NVMe flash array and the parallel architecture of the underlying system. Instead of having very large gateway nodes or very large servers that exist at the border of a lake of storage, the Pavilion approach is to have many mid-size to smaller server nodes, which can basically all access the main flash array. This means that there's no bottleneck going into that very high-speed array. It's a better size, given the size of the user requests.

Typically, Pavilion sizes its multi-node system in such a way that each parallel node can actually service requests from individual users and because there are so many of them, everyone can essentially do this in parallel. It eliminates the bottlenecks in that respect.

Pavilion provides us with flexibility in our storage, which is one of the reasons that we've applied this architecture. There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint. Ultimately, Pavilion ensures industry-standard protocols. They present their storage as just NVMe over Fabrics, so it's standard-conforming. That means you can basically hook it into anything you want. It means that you can run GPFS on it, and you can run anything that can talk to NVMe over Fabrics. This means that we can use the Pavilion box as a drop-in replacement for a conventional array.

The fact that this solution enables us to run block, file, and object storage is something that's very important. As the industry changes, there's a tendency towards that type of overall storage solution and there's a lot of competition in that space. It's nice to see Pavilion taking it very seriously. It's one of those things where our needs evolve on a day-to-day basis. While it may not be important now, it will become more important in the future and it's important that anyone in this segment takes that technology seriously.

We haven't deployed Pavilion's HyperOS 3.0 support for global namespace for files and objects yet, although I have used it in lab environments. I think it's very compelling and I'm very excited about it. Of course, with NVMe, we roll things out slowly. But luckily, we have excellent partners in the area like AIT, who has a lab deployment where we can actually test these features out. Really, HyperOS 3.0 is the result of a lot of feedback that we provided them as well as played a key role in how that was architected. So, it's nice to see our feedback reflected in the direction of the software and the hardware.

The performance on it is stellar, but what most attracted me to the solution was the bring your own disk idea. With traditional SAN storage, you are buying their technology and name, but the disks are just commodity disks. When you open up an HPE SAN or a Dell EMC SAN, and you start pulling the drives out, they are the same kind of drives that you can buy on Amazon all day long. However, they add an extra zero to the cost at the end; they are ten times or more what you would actually pay to buy these things yourself. They just flash them with a special firmware so their SAN will recognize and use them, preventing other similar disks from working in it, then they charge you a premium. 

With Pavilion’s BYOD technology, as long as you have some high-performance disk (and it is a well-known disk in the marketplace) you can buy your own disk and populate your array however you want. This means that you don't have to buy a new storage array when the price of disk falls, or disk becomes more condensed, or when there is a paradigm shift in the technology that allows them to make these things cheaper. So, every couple of years, we can replace the disks in the SAN without replacing the SAN itself, and it is tremendously cheaper to do it that way.

It is extremely important that Pavilion offers flexibility in terms of storage and density. I have gone through many cycles in my career where I bought a SAN. The seller would talk a good game about how the SAN was expandable, but all that meant was that I could buy an additional SAN in the future and make them talk on the same network. That is not what anybody wants. They just want to be able to replace the older technology with something newer, not bolt something else on and take up more space in the data center.

We find it valuable that you can scale the capacity and the performance independently.

The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features.