Press Releases

eHarmony Finds Bliss With 3PAR Utility Storage

Online Matchmaker Reduces Administration Time 95% and Avoids Complexity of Modular Storage Alternative

FREMONT, CA, US — August 30, 2005

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that eHarmony, the Internet's premier personal relationship service based on scientifically-proven compatibility principles, has selected the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server to consolidate and protect its mission-critical production system information, including core customer and transaction processing databases. The Pasadena, California-based company selected 3PAR over other vendors for ease of administration, seamless scalability and cost-effective data protection.

"Buying ten year old storage technology doesn't work for us. The capabilities 3PAR brought to the table were a no-brainer," said Mark Douglas, Vice President of Technology at eHarmony. "Once you understand 3PAR's architecture, the benefits are obvious and compelling."

Competing aggressively with other online matchmaking firms, eHarmony strives to bring IT projects to market quickly while minimizing the cost of delivering and supporting those projects. By consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage, eHarmony was able to avoid costly incremental investment in IT expertise, including the need to hire a database administrator and a SAN administrator. The reduction in storage complexity also freed existing administrative resources to pursue key growth projects.

"We didn't want our people managing disk drives, and with 3PAR we don't have to set up and manage RAID groups. The system is self-managing and automatically balances I/O over every drive," commented Douglas. "This lets us leverage the efficiency of RAID 5 liberally, and activities that would usually take a month to accomplish with traditional storage systems now require just a few minutes with 3PAR. That savings is huge for us."

With over eight million users, eHarmony is the Internet's fastest growing relationship service. To accommodate business growth — which consumes gigabytes of new capacity per day — and to support new initiatives, eHarmony sought to replace its aging infrastructure of modular arrays. After considering modular array alternatives from a traditional vendor, eHarmony selected a 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Server for each of its data centers. 3PAR Thin Provisioning software was also chosen for use with eHarmony's databases. eHarmony's mission critical website, matchmaking application, payment processing and photo and profile servers are now supported by 3PAR.

"The other solutions we considered had a learning curve and a level of complexity that we just didn't want to undertake," commented Douglas.

Additionally, eHarmony chose 3PAR Virtual Copy for flexible and efficient array-based snapshots. With 3PAR Virtual Copy, eHarmony has increased availability of its mission critical applications by taking hourly snapshots of all their related databases. eHarmony's IT department also affordably retains these snapshots for up to a week to enable rapid recovery from multiple points in time. They also perform non-disruptive, off-host backups of their databases from these snapshots. Lastly, eHarmony was able to connect multiple host servers directly to each of its InServ Storage Servers, saving the company additional expenditures on redundant, switched SAN environments.

"Consolidation is a preferred method for achieving a more cost-effective, shared storage resource, but many approaches to consolidation require special training and introduce additional complexity" said John McArthur, Group Vice President and General Manager for Information Infrastructure Research at IDC. "Many companies lack the expertise to manage complex shared storage pools. Solutions like 3PAR's Utility Storage platform, that both enable consolidation and avoid introducing added complexity, are ideal for these companies."

"Companies like eHarmony which need to eliminate complexity and manage rapid and unpredictable growth are turning to 3PAR Utility Storage for their consolidated mission critical infrastructure," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "The benefits observed by eHarmony demonstrate that 3PAR Utility Storage is uniquely suited for utility computing and rapid return on investment."

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE Arca: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.