Press Releases

3PAR Announces Microsoft Exchange Benchmark Results

3PAR Utility Storage Delivers Simplicity, Performance and Scalability with Microsoft Exchange

FREMONT, CA, June 19, 2007

3PAR®, the leading provider of utility storage, announced today new Microsoft® Exchange benchmark results, now available through the Microsoft Exchange® Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP). 3PAR's Exchange benchmark results demonstrate a number of significant customer benefits when deploying 3PAR Utility Storage in Microsoft Exchange environments. These benefits include:

Unmatched performance within a clustered, modular array
Predictable and linear performance scalability of 100 Exchange users per disk drive
Extraordinary simplicity of storage provisioning and scaling
The ability to leverage cost- and power-efficient 147GB 10K RPM drives

"Strategic messaging infrastructures like Microsoft Exchange must deliver high performance and scale on-demand for any high-growth business," said Tom Trainer, Senior Analyst at Evaluator Group. "3PAR's ease of management combined with its demonstrated performance and linear scalability in an Exchange environment is compelling."

3PAR's benchmark results demonstrate that users can scale Microsoft Exchange databases simply and confidently within a single, massively scalable storage platform, thereby avoiding the costs and complexities associated with multiple systems. The highly virtualized, massively parallel 3PAR InSpire® Architecture, which automatically spreads data evenly across all drives and system resources, assures high and predictable levels of performance. Unlike traditional storage arrays, 3PAR InServ® Storage Server performance continues to scale to higher levels as additional hardware resources are added to the array. Upon adding additional controller nodes or capacity, users simply rebalance existing I/O workloads with a single command—online and non-disruptively—to distribute data evenly over all system resources.

The experiences of 3PAR Utility Storage customers such as Claria support these Exchange benchmark results. Claria helps business partners engage with their consumers by providing a personalization platform that powers Web sites, software applications, and hardware devices.

"Email is the lifeblood of our day-to-day business at Claria. Ensuring that our Exchange environment is supported by a high performance, highly scalable and easy-to-use storage platform is mission-critical for us," said Claria CIO Oswald D'Sa. "With 3PAR Utility Storage, we can meet rigorous service levels while avoiding the capital cost and administrative complexity that generally result when Exchange is isolated from other production workloads. With 3PAR, performance headroom is virtually limitless since all workloads benefit with the addition of each new drive to the InServ's highly virtualized architecture."

The documented best practices that accompany 3PAR's ESRP benchmark results reflect the 3PAR InServ Storage Server's native simplicity. In contrast to traditional storage platforms, storage layout on the InServ is automatically balanced across all system resources, with no requirement to isolate Exchange volumes from other workloads on the array and no requirement for manual performance tuning.

"These results validate what our customers have known for some time now," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "With its distinct advantages in simplicity, efficiency and scalability, utility storage is an ideal platform for consolidating high-growth Microsoft Exchange environments."

3PAR's Exchange benchmark results are based on Jetstress, a Microsoft tool that simulates the underlying Jet database and log file workload under normal and stress conditions for a specific number of users in order to help verify disk performance. Specific results posted by 3PAR are as follows:

InServ E200 Storage Server (two controller nodes) with 120 drives: 12,000 users
InServ S800 Storage Server (two controller nodes) with 240 drives: 24,000 users
InServ S800 Storage Server (four controller nodes) with 480 drives: 48,000 users

The server and storage test environment included Sun Fire™ x4100 servers, Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition and 3PAR InServ Storage Servers with cost- and power-efficient 147GB 10K RPM Fibre Channel drives.

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.