3PAR Internet / Web 2.0 Customers

» Press Release

Alibris has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage to support all mission-critical applications, including its data-intensive product inventory system. After evaluating alternatives from traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors, Alibris selected 3PAR Utility Storage to support its inventory management system, retail website, search engine, and e-commerce order-processing system, all of which are based on multiple clustered Microsoft® SQL Server™ databases. Alibris provides an online exchange for sellers of more than 60 million used, new and out-of-print book, music and movie titles worldwide.

A reliable, high-performing and easy-to-use consolidated storage platform is key to successfully scaling our data-intensive applications. With 3PAR Utility Storage we get maximum simplicity coupled with high performance. Now only 15% of our system administrator's time is spent managing storage. 3PAR's virtualization automatically optimizes our disk drive investment with zero potential for lost performance.

-Michael Schaffer
Chief Technology Officer, Alibris

Ask.com, the world's seventh-largest Web property and premier provider of online information services, chose 3PAR Utility Storage over monolithic arrays from traditional vendors to consolidate and support its mission-critical portal and ad-serving databases. 3PAR Utility Storage is now used to support Ask.com, Excite, iWon, MyWay, Smiley Central, and Zwinky Web properties.

» Case Study

As the largest career advancement and online employment advertising Website in the US, CareerBuilder puts over 1 million jobs in front of poised job seekers every day. Owned by Gannett Co, Inc., Tribune Company, The McClatchy Company, and Microsoft Corp., the job search portal offers a vast online and print network to help job seekers connect with employers. CareerBuilder also powers the online job search centers for more than 1,600 partners, including 140 newspapers and leading Web portals such as AOL and MSN. More than 23 million unique visitors come to the site every month to explore opportunities in every industry, field, and job type. CareerBuilder and its subsidiaries already operate in the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia and cite continued expansion as a critical element of their business plan moving forward.

We felt constrained by the architecture of our previous storage vendor. 3PAR has given us the agility to handle large volumes and quickly support new business initiatives.

-Colin Field
Director of Site Infrastructure, CareerBuilder.com

Community Connect creates and maintains online communities targeted at US ethnic audiences. Community Connect's Web properties include AsianAvenue.com, BlackPlanet.com, and MiGente.com, boasting 16 million users and about 1.2 billion page views a month. The company's NetApp environment had reached its limit in both performance and capacity when Community Connect decided to deploy OnStor's NAS gateways coupled with 3PAR Utility Storage.

With 3PAR, management tasks such as storage provisioning—which used to take us days—can now be done in minutes.

-Nicholas Tang
Director of Operations, Community Connect

» Press Release

Software as a Service (SaaS) provider Cvent, Inc. has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage to consolidate internal systems, support mission-critical SaaS offerings via the cloud, and replace cumbersome and inefficient tape-based backup. A 3PAR customer since 2004, Cvent has realized a total savings of more than half a million dollars in storage administration costs alone by consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage. These savings, combined with the native simplicity of 3PAR Utility Storage and the unique built-in features offered by 3PAR InServ^® Storage Servers, are the reason that Cvent has continued to choose 3PAR for all of the company’s major storage initiatives as the SaaS provider’s internal and external needs have grown.

After five years, 3PAR continues to provide us with substantial cost savings. As our needs evolve, we periodically re-evaluate the enterprise storage market and have found that 3PAR continues to innovate and deliver market-leading technologies at competitive price points. 3PAR has stayed ahead of the competition by offering compelling, leading-edge features, and that helps my organization to stay ahead of our competition.

-Dwayne Sye
Chief Information Officer, Cvent, Inc.

» Press Release

Demand Media™ is a Web 2.0 social media company that uses its network of Web properties to connect content creators and large audiences with advertisers. Storage is a critical component of Demand Media's business model, so the social media company has built an entire virtual datacenter based on 3PAR Utility Storage and the 3cV blueprint. With highly virtualized, dynamically tiered 3PAR arrays supporting their utility computing environment, Demand Media has the agility and resilience to keep pace with rapid and unpredictable growth.

» Press Release
» Computerworld eHarmony Q&A

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. eHarmony also chose 3PAR Thin Provisioning software. eHarmony's mission-critical website, matchmaking application, payment processing, and photo and profile servers are now supported by 3PAR Utility Storage.

Buying ten-year-old storage technology doesn't work for us. The capabilities 3PAR brought to the table were a no-brainer. Once you understand 3PAR's architecture, the benefits are obvious and compelling.

-Mark Douglas
VP of Technology, eHarmony

» Press Release

The world's largest photo blogging community, Fotolog is an online community that lets anyone publish an online photo journal, or photo blog, and share it worldwide. Enthusiasts from 200 countries post over 230,000 photos and one million messages each day. Since deploying two 3PAR InServ Storage Servers with 3PAR Thin Provisioning—one for production and one for remote disk-to-disk backup—Fotolog has reduced storage administration time by 99%.

With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, you set it up and walk away. As actual data is written, the system tells us when it needs more capacity—which is added simply and non-disruptively. With 3PAR, we've cut our monthly storage administration time from 40 hours to 30 minutes.

-Nathan Boeger
Director of Network Operations, Fotolog

» Press Release

FreshDirect is the largest and fastest-growing online provider of fresh foods in New York City. This Queens-based firm regularly prepares and delivers over 8,000 products to over 100,000 customers. FreshDirect has over $100 million in revenues and has flourished by leveraging e-commerce distribution and supply chain best practices. With the deployment of 3PAR Utility Storage, FreshDirect has consolidated their general corporate applications in order to gain business agility and enhance customer service.

Our IT is now poised to enable the expansion of our business. 3PAR has helped us retain orders and enhance our customers' experience by creating a faster, more available environment.

-Myles Trachtenberg
Chief Technology Officer, FreshDirect

» Press Release

A 3PAR "Think Thin. Think Green." award recipient, IAC is the owner and operator of more than 60 specialized and global brands. Recognized by 3PAR as a leading user of Thin Provisioning, IAC is significantly reducing costs and annual energy consumption with the efficient thin technologies offered with 3PAR Utility Storage. IAC, 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.

» Press Release

Jacent, a leading provider of on-demand ordering solutions for the restaurant and hospitality industries, deployed 3PAR Utility Storage with 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Virtual Copy to support its Web-based, mission-critical Ordering-On-Demand platform. Jacent selected the 3PAR InServ Storage Server because it offers a high-performance and high-availability storage infrastructure with unmatched simplicity and efficiency.

A highly responsive, available, yet cost-competitive IT infrastructure is key to our success. With 3PAR Utility Storage, we estimate that we have cut our total cost of ownership for storage by two-thirds over competing platforms while still being able to meet our rigorous service level demands.

-Venky Rangachari
Vice President of Operations, Jacent

» Press Release

The leading women’s online health portal LifeScript.com has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage for affordable, scalable, and highly intelligent storage as part of an enhanced utility computing environment. With 3PAR, LifeScript’s Web 2.0 portal and email processing engine now supports three billion transactions per month for a third less cost than their previous storage environment. LifeScript’s new infrastructure has also enhanced business agility by reducing average time to provision new servers from several hours to just minutes. LifeScript delivers health guidance and resources to women over the internet using a cloud computing delivery model. This service delivery is backed by a resilient, agile, and high-performance utility computing infrastructure built on next-gen Utility Storage arrays from 3PAR and server virtualization from VMware®.

When 3PAR came along, we were firmly committed to growing our traditional storage infrastructure in response to increasing storage capacity needs following server virtualization migration onto VMware. However, after further investigation, it quickly became obvious that 3PAR offered us not only capacity savings, but intelligent integration with VMware to curb storage costs and give us greater performance and agility.

-Jack Hogan
Chief Operations Officer, LifeScript.com

LinkShare, a leading provider of full-service online marketing solutions, has deployed 3PAR InServ® StorageServers in its virtual datacenter to support increased activity during the peak holiday shopping season. LinkShare chose multi-tiered InServ arrays to handle heavy traffic over “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” at a lower total cost than is possible with traditional storage. By choosing 3PAR Utility Storage over legacy arrays, LinkShare was able to save $150,000-200,000 per year on administration costs while also cutting datacenter footprint and power consumption by 50%.

We need the ability to keep up with ever-growing consumer activity online between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In fact, we calculated that we could have easily handled twice the load with our 3PAR InServs.

-Jonathan Levine
Co-President, LinkShare

» Case Study
» Presentation: Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com
» Inside MySpace Article

MySpace Video Case Study—3PAR Savings Register now »

is a technology company connecting people through personal expression, content, and culture. MySpace empowers its global community to experience the Internet through a social lens by integrating personal profiles, photos, videos, mobile, messaging, games, and the world’s largest music community.

We purchased 3PAR because the benefits were significant enough to warrant a shift away from traditional enterprise storage technologies. Provisioning is ridiculously simple and the scalability can match the rapid growth of our business. It's clear to us that 3PAR has something very special and is increasingly becoming well established with high-growth companies like ours.

-Aber Whitcomb
Chief Technology Officer, MySpace.com

» Press Release
» Case Study

NewsGator Technologies provides individuals, self-hosting corporations, and SaaS customers with scalable solutions for pulling value from the Web through customized delivery of RSS content. NewsGator supports its business with a multi-tier architecture that includes SQL Server 2008 and 3PAR Utility Storage as its primary data SAN. NewsGator benefits from the enhanced Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2008, which it uses for high availability.

3PAR already provides a reliable and easy-to-use consolidated storage platform for our Windows Server environment. With 3PAR’s support of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, we can now combine Microsoft’s most advanced operating system and database technology with our 3PAR Utility Storage platform to run our business with complete confidence.

-Glenn Berry
Database Architect, NewsGator Technologies

» Press Release
» Case Study
» SNW: Ron Rose Interview
» Network World Article

Priceline Video Case Study—3PAR Savings Register now »

The 3PAR price was just right for "name-your-own-price" online travel pioneer Priceline.com. Traditional modular monolithic storage neither fit the bill nor Priceline.com's need for availability, ease-of-use, performance, and cost savings. As the foundation for its utility storage environment, Priceline.com consolidated 50 Fibre Channel and 60 SCSI arrays onto five larger 3PAR InServ Storage Servers. Each system delivers automatic volume management and configuration as well as automatic load balancing across all of the system resources, thus dramatically reducing storage administration and eliminating the need to overprovision purchased resources. The InServ's massive and fine-grained scalability of capacity, performance, and connectivity, enables Priceline.com to grow within their purchased systems, not out of them.

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

» Press Release

Shopzilla, formerly BizRate.com, is the most powerful and easiest-to-use shopping search site on the Web. With an index of more than 30 million products from more than 55,000 stores, Shopzilla uses ShopRank, a proprietary patent-pending algorithm, to help shoppers instantly find virtually anything on sale from anyone, anywhere on the Web, at the best price.

» Press Release

TechSoup Global is one of the most comprehensive nonprofit technology assistance providers in the world, conducting a range of major donation programs on the international, national, and the local level. With their entire donation program managed online through the TechSoup.org Website, TechSoup Global chose 3PAR Utility Storage to keep costs to a minimum while building a resilient, high-performance, highly scalable storage infrastructure. To date they have purchased two 3PAR InServ® E200 Storage Servers for two datacenter locations.

The other platforms we looked at had serious drawbacks such as complex management interfaces, inability to stand by performance numbers, and lack of fully-developed thin provisioning capabilities. 3PAR are the innovators of thin provisioning, and although other vendors are now trying to catch up, they just can’t match 3PAR.

-Tim Suttle
Director of Information Systems Infrastructure, TechSoup Global

» Press Release: June 2009
» Press Release: March 2009

Tickets.com®, a leading provider of fully integrated event ticketing services for thousands of top arts, entertainment, and sports organizations worldwide, has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage as the foundation for its signature ProVenue® ticketing platform. The decision to deploy highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage has enabled Tickets.com to improve management efficiency by 10x and reduce the time to deployment window by 88% as compared to traditional storage arrays from other vendors. The event ticketing vendor has also reported up-front cost savings with 3PAR that total more than half a million dollars as compared to traditional arrays.

Other storage vendors simply couldn’t offer us the cost advantages, functionality, scalability, and ease of management that 3PAR did. With 3PAR, all the advanced features we needed were integrated into the system and provided at a cost well below that of the alternatives, and we didn’t need a dedicated SAN team or any additional people to manage it. With 3PAR, our systems were up and we were provisioning storage to our database servers within a day. That’s unheard of with other platforms.

-Brett Michalak
Chief Information Officer, Tickets.com

»Press Release

TheLadders.com is the world's leading online service catering exclusively to the $100k+ job market. By replacing their legacy storage infrastructure with 3PAR Utility Storage, TheLadders.com has cut their total cost of storage in half. The online job search website deployed 3PAR Utility Storage in conjunction with server virtualization from VMware^® as part of a datacenter virtualization initiative that reduced the company’s storage capacity requirements by 66% and significantly reduced storage administration time. In addition, by consolidating onto a single, highly virtualized 3PAR InServ^® Storage Server, TheLadders.com eliminated the use of separate arrays for different applications and reliance on costly consulting services.

By allowing us to cut our storage TCO by 50%, 3PAR was clearly the most cost-effective solution. With 3PAR, we now have the ability to add storage at the drop of a hat and the platform’s superior reliability and high performance protects our critical end-user experience.

-Frey Kuo
Director of Information Technology and Operations, TheLadders.com