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3PAR attracts ROI-conscious conservatives

Is 3PAR Utility Storage a risky investment? After weighing countless alternatives, budget-conscious companies such as Thomas Weisel Partners, priceline.com®, CommunityConnect and Enformion™ don’t think so! In fact, their 3PAR technology investments have enabled them to consolidate and simplify their storage environment while substantially cutting costs.

Thomas Weisel Partners drives utilization to nearly 100% and cuts administration costs by 95%

Thomas Weisel Partners (TWP), a leading merchant bank, adopted 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers to consolidate and protect mission critical Oracle, messaging, and file-based data. TWP chose 3PAR for its simplicity, cost-effectiveness, capacity utilization, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.

3PAR Utility Storage has been a relief for our organization. We can now apply 95% fewer resources to storage administration and we are rid of the high-price premiums associated with monolithic arrays.

—Larry Sikon
Chief Information Officer
Thomas Weisel Partners

By consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage, TWP has made significant gains in capacity utilization. For applications taking advantage of 3PAR Thin Provisioning with dedicate-on-write technology, utilization of allocated capacity now approaches 100%. Prior to consolidating onto 3PAR, TWP’s storage environment consisted of traditional monolithic and direct-attached storage with dedicate-on-allocation technology. Utilization of allocated capacity was 30%, just above average for dedicate-on-allocation environments.

Thanks to 3PAR Thin Provisioning, TWP has been able to purchase 3PAR InServ Storage Servers configured with half the raw capacity required by competing alternatives. The merchant bank now runs all Oracle, Exchange and file services on 3PAR Utility Storage, company-wide, thus achieving a new level of storage consolidation. In addition with 3PAR Remote Copy, data is mirrored approximately 3,000 miles between sites, protecting critical corporate information from disaster.

For more information
Press Release
InformationWeek: Investement Bank Consolidates Storage Using Utility-Computing Technology

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Priceline.com doubles capacity utilization and reduces administration costs by 50%

The 3PAR price was just right for Name Your Own Price® online travel pioneer priceline.com, Inc. Traditional modular monolithic storage was too expensive and did not meet the need that priceline.com had for availability, ease-of-use, performance and cost-savings.

3PAR Utility Storage is the most cost-effective storage we’ve found to meet our critical performance and 99.999% availability objectives. By consolidating on 3PAR, we’ve reduced our storage administration by more than 50% and doubled our capacity utilization.

Ron Rose
Chief Information Officer,
Priceline.com
Source: Storage Networking World Online

Priceline.com consolidated 50 Fibre Channel and 60 SCSI arrays onto just five 3PAR InServ Storage Servers as the foundation for its Utility Storage environment. Each system delivers automatic volume management and configuration as well as automatic load balancing across all of the system resources—dramatically reducing storage administration and eliminating the need to over-provision purchased resources. Furthermore, through the InServ’s massive and fine-grained scalability of capacity, performance and connectivity, priceline.com is able to grow within their purchased systems, not out of them.

The consolidation on 3PAR InServ Storage Servers also protects all of priceline.com’s mission critical and SAN-resident data, including core demand collection and offer processing data resident within Oracle databases. Replacing priceline.com’s previous modular storage environment with 3PAR Utility Storage has resulted in other significant gains, including a reduction in power and floor space requirements in excess of 60%. The high scalability and port density of 3PAR InServ Storage Servers has also allowed priceline.com to optimize its significant switching investment by cutting port usage more than 50% in its SAN infrastructure. In addition, the embedded volume management capabilities of the 3PAR InForm® Operating System have enabled priceline.com to avoid host-based volume management licensing, support and administration costs.

If you're going to automate your data-processing operations, the first two things you should look at are storage and provisioning. With Utility Storage, you can avoid the administrative headaches of the most prevalent types of disk storage around today. Provisioning is crucial since the ROI on provisioning is extremely strong. Getting your disk storage and your provisioning flexible and responsive are two homework assignments that you must complete before you can implement grid and utility computing properly.

Ron Rose
Chief Information Officer,
Priceline.com
Source:NetworkWorld

For more information
Press Release
SNW Online : Utility Storage helps Priceline achieve high availability
NetworkWorld: The Sky's the Limit

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CommunityConnect selects 3PAR and ONStor for simple and scalable Utility NAS

CommunityConnect, Inc. (CCI) creates and maintains online communities targeted at U.S. ethnic audiences. CCI’s Web properties include AsianAvenue.com, BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com, boasting 16 million users and about 1.2 billion page views a month. With customers requiring more storage for personal Web pages, documents and images, and with different user activities occurring at different times on each site, CommunityConnect needed to be able to quickly provision storage to the appropriate site. The company’s NetApp environment had reached its limit in both performance and capacity. CommunityConnect considered adding storage from NetApp and EMC, but these options were dismissed in favor of OnStor's NAS gateways coupled with a 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers.

Management tasks such as storage provisioning that used to take days can now be done in minutes.

—Nicholas Tang
Director of Operations,
CommunityConnect Inc.

For more information
SearchStorage: CCI ditches NetApp for ONStor Gateways

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Enformion selects 3PAR for performance and scalability

Enformion™ provides complete public records database access services and value-added professional information management solutions to banks, government agencies, insurance companies, law enforcement, and law firms. The company needed more capacity and performance to accommodate its rapid business growth. After considering traditional storage vendors, Enformion was convinced that only 3PAR offered the greatest and most simply achievable performance and scalability.

We considered several options: EMC CX, EMC DMX, Hitachi 9980, Hitachi USP, IBM DS6800, and IBM DS8100. I dealt with technical reps at each company to discuss what we're trying to do and how to best achieve it. In the end, the reason we chose 3PAR is their system gives very good performance without much need for administration.

—Steve Sadler
Database Administrator,
Enformion

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