Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds as the biz formerly known as Pillar Data is shuttered

close call!

I had a job offer to join that team last summer but the job requisition was never signed off by senior HR after weeks of waiting it was withdrawn.

NEVER RESIGN FROM A JOB UNTIL YOU GET A SIGNED OFFER AND START DATE!

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FS1 road for disaster

I am an ex-Oracle storage sales, we were waiting long for the FS1 to be released with high anticipation. Once it was publicly announced our sales strategy was to pitch this before their other hybrid NAS storage array the ZFS (which is mainly sold as a backup appliance to Oracle's Exadata customers). Although the block-based FS1 had good performance, it was lacking many features that other 'ground-up designed' flash arrays had. I think it was on the market for just 1 or 1,5 years before it was already taken off our price list. The customer who were brave enough to invest in it were pushed to buy their expansions quickly before stock ran out.

The Pillar organization is now downgraded, in the near future the same will happen with the remaining ZFS engineering team, which is also put on a 'keeping the lights on' development program without releasing major new features. Same is unfortunately happening with the StorageTek (tape) range of products, with it's last major feat not to release their T10000E enterprise tape drive once LTO8 caught up with StorageTek technology advantage...

Protecting customer's Exadata workload with ZFS or ZDLRA is a way to go when you want to make yourself completely dependent on an organization like Oracle.....However although Oracle claims specific performance with Hybrid Columnar Compression or other advanced database-code knowledge leading to better performance/TCO, there are solutions on the market with at least the same performance and verification features and a much better compression and restore rate than the outdated ZFS. Have a look at Data Domain with native RMAN integration and management by the DBA team through their own OEM console ;)

Hey!!

_I_ was taken round the back, once...

Worked for them briefly

I worked at Pillar very briefly many years ago, must have been around 2004 (jeez, has it really been 15 years???) and so glad I quit when I did and didn't waste more than a few months there. There's nothing they ever did, nor a product they ever announced, that made me regret leaving.

The only really notable thing I remember about Pillar was that they had a painting of Workman's Dachshund on the roof of the headquarters.

Stop moaning!

I don't know why they're moaning. They rode the bus to the end of the line and got the bag of cash. Spare a thought for the ones they didn't RIF - they're the walking dead. Go get a meaningful job somewhere - you'll actually like it on the outside.