3PAR Government & Education Customers

» Press Release

Austin Independent School District (AISD) chose to invest in highly virtualized storage servers from 3PAR as a more agile and efficient, green alternative to their aging Storage Area Network (SAN) of legacy storage arrays. Since deploying the T-Class array, AISD has saved 55% in storage costs and has kept power demand increases down to less than 30%.

3PAR Utility Storage is so easy, I could manage it in my sleep. However, the biggest change for us as a result of deploying 3PAR is the peace of mind we now have. We no longer have to worry about running out of space and power or projecting future capacity requirements. Basically, we can focus on education instead of our storage.

-William de DuFour
Director Network Systems & Support, Austin ISD

» Press Release

A 3PAR "Think Thin. Think Green." award recipient, CACI is a Fortune 1000 solution provider. Recognized by 3PAR as a leading user of Thin Provisioning, CACI is significantly reducing costs and annual energy consumption with the efficient thin technologies offered with 3PAR Utility Storage. CACI, combined with two other leading 3PAR Thin Provisioning users, saves approximately one-quarter million kilowatt hours of energy on an annual basis—eliminating the output of nearly 400,000 lbs. of C02 emissions each year. To recognize these leading organizations and their use of Thin Provisioning, 3PAR awarded three customers—IAC, CACI, and Edelman—with the "Think Thin. Think Green." award in 2007. As part of the award recognition, 3PAR purchased $3,000 in carbon offsets on behalf of each winner through TerraPass, the leading retailer of greenhouse gas reduction programs in the US.

Chosen by IDG's InfoWorld as one of the "Green 15", California State University East Bay (CSUEB) deployed the powerful combination of 3PAR and VMware to avert a power crisis and meet green computing goals. They replaced inefficient, outdated storage with a utility computing infrastructure to reduce storage capacity requirements by 80% and power consumption by 26%--even after adding 21 new applications. These savings qualified CSUEB to receive financial incentives from PG&E through the Virtual Technology Incentive Program (V-TIP) based on projected power savings of $30,000. These savings were independently validated by Wikibon Energy Lab--a service provided by wikibon.org, which determined that 3PAR Thin Provisioning reduces energy consumption by up to 75% and that replacing aging storage with next-gen 3PAR arrays can save up to 90% on energy costs.

Lowering operational costs through storage virtualization is a key opportunity for our IT organization. The incentives that PG&E provides for deploying 3PAR storage virtualization and Thin Provisioning offer a compelling enticement to accelerate our storage virtualization efforts.

-Jonathan Taylor
Systems Engineer, California State University, East Bay

» Press Release

The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DCWASA) is a multi-jurisdictional regional utility that provides drinking water and wastewater collection and treatment to more than 500,000 retail, residential, commercial, and governmental customers in the District of Columbia. DCWASA relies on 3PAR to support not only its customer information, but also the monitoring and tracking of its entire distribution system, which consists of thousands of valves and hydrants as well as miles of pipe.

With 3PAR Rapid Provisioning we can now meet storage requests so quickly that when a database administrator puts in a request for new storage, that request is completed before they can return to their desk.

-Joe Edwards
Team Lead Network Administrator at DCWASA, District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority

» Press Release


Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – National Ignition Facility (LLNL-NIF), a research facility home to the world’s largest laser, chose 3PAR Utility Storage to support fusion research. The next-generation 3PAR Utility Storage systems at the LLNL-NIF have saved the program 60% on raw storage capacity purchases and have given LLNL-NIF improved scalability, increased application performance, and 99.999% availability. In addition, the cost savings achieved through reducing total capacity purchased, combined with improving administrative efficiency by 80%, has freed up budgetary and human resources to be channeled into speeding seminal alternative energy research.

Agility is mission-critical to our fusion research program. With 3PAR Utility Storage we can support the growing performance and capacity needs of our research as we work to change our world through harnessing the energy of the stars.

-Travis Martin
IT Operations Lead, Lawrence Livermore National Labs - NIF

» Press Release

NASA Ames Research Center has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage to store digital images taken with the Kepler Space Telescope as it orbits the Sun tracking planets in solar systems outside our own. NASA Ames chose the resilient 3PAR storage system to meet strict cost and performance requirements. Their decision to implement 3PAR Utility Storage was also based on the massive scalability that the platform would give them and the fact that, with 3PAR, NASA could avoid the need for a full-time, dedicated storage expert.

We simply can't predict our ultimate storage needs at this time, but the agility, resilience, and scalability of 3PAR's technology gives us confidence in our storage infrastructure—no matter how large our data needs grow.

-Chris Middour
Manager, Kepler Operations Science Center (Orbital Sciences Corporation), NASA Ames Research Center

» Press Release

Seattle University currently has five VMware® ESX servers and over 40 virtualized servers, all running on their 3PAR InServ Storage Server. The educational institution also uses advanced VMware ESX functionality including VMotion, which is capable of migrating a running virtual machine to a different physical server without service interruption. With this joint 3PAR and VMware solution, Seattle University has the agility to rapidly provision new virtual servers and respond to user requests in a more timely fashion. Automation, ease of use, simplicity of management, and high performance levels are just some of the benefits the university has experienced with their joint 3PAR and VMware solution.

Everything just works the way it is supposed to, including advanced VMware ESX functionality. The 3PAR array's virtualization capabilities make it simple to manage and maintain high performance levels automatically. Performance, availability, and support have been excellent from both 3PAR and VMware.

-Charles Gentry
Unix Architect / Systems Manager, Seattle University

» Case Study

Texas Christian University (TCU) is a private, coeducational school in Fort Worth, Texas. Until recently, TCU relied heavily on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 for e-mail, which it used to facilitate communication and collaboration among students and faculty. Due to student population growth and longer data retention policies, TCU had reached the limits of its e-mail storage system. Also, users were struggling with the relatively small mailbox sizes available to them. TCU decided to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and to convert to native clustering. It also implemented highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage to boost disk capacity utilization. As a result, TCU reduced performance issues, increased mailbox size, implemented a clustered continuous replication solution, and provided a platform for continued growth.

With 3PAR and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, we increased our maximum mailbox size by fivefold with only 1.2TB of initial storage allocation, compared to the 12.9TB of dedicated storage our previous storage solution would have required.

-Philip Howell
Client/Server Lead, Texas Christian University

» Press Release

The U.S. Army selected 3PAR Utility Storage with 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Remote Copy to support its mission-essential Distributed Learning System (DLS) group. DLS selected 3PAR Utility Storage for its ease-of-use, cost-effective disaster recovery, simple implementation, and ability to cut storage capacity. 3PAR Remote Copy delivers dramatic cost savings by enabling DLS to implement long-distance disaster recovery over IP simply and with no vendor professional services. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, DLS has cut the potential cost of their storage capacity by 50%.

With 3PAR Utility Storage, we are able to provide training for U.S. Army Soldiers and units—anytime, anywhere—for significantly reduced physical storage cost and effort. 3PAR enables us to achieve our training objectives by providing cost-efficient access to critical training programs that are essential to mission success.

-Bob Hall
Storage Architect, U.S. Army (Distributed Learning System)

» Press Release

A division of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Center for Economic Studies has created a flexible and cost-effective utility computing environment by deploying 3PAR Utility Storage and Linux. This deployment has enabled the U.S. Census Bureau to significantly increase its support of researchers by extending access to research on economic and demographic data to leading universities and institutions. By selecting a modular, Linux-based server solution with 3PAR Utility Storage, the Census Bureau has tripled the scale of its centralized data environment to a total of 35 terabytes, simply and affordably. They have also reduced storage administration by 95%, freeing valuable time. As a result, the Census Bureau's growing user base is able to access more data than ever, both reliably and quickly.

Our users were stifled by an inflexible environment. We have extensive experience with numerous vendors and solutions, but nothing delivered the simplicity, scalability, and flexibility we've gotten from the 3PAR system.

-Darrin Stolba
Project Lead, U.S. Census Bureau's Research Data Center Upgrade, U.S. Census Bureau