"It always makes sense to wait at least two weeks to install the newest version," he says.

King recently to Pillar from IBM System Storage DS4500, an older product that IBM is no longer selling.

Pillar storage is designed to drive up disk utilization rates by providing extra RAID controllers. It's also billed as "application-aware," meaning it knows the requirements of specific applications and can dynamically reassign resources based on changing priorities.

For example, it's easy to move data from high-performance disk drives to the archive layer, King says. Pillar is able to squeeze lots of performance out of standard SATA drives that are not as expensive as Fibre Channel hardware, he says. (Compare )  

"You can selectively decide how fast or slow you want your storage to be," he says. "That's extremely important. We have lots of stuff we don't need on really fast spinning disk, but we need it on nearline availability."