Press Releases

Silverpop Reaches Millions With 3PAR Utility Storage

Performance, 80 percent Reduction in Administration Time with 3PAR

FREMONT, CA— August 8, 2006

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Silverpop, a leading email marketing solutions, strategies and services provider, has selected 3PAR Utility Storage with Dynamic Optimization to deliver, track and archive its mission critical opt-in email campaigns. Silverpop selected the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server because it offers the seamless aging of its campaign data and enhanced campaign service levels while reducing administrative time by 80 percent.

"3PAR's tiered-storage approach allows us to support multiple service levels simultaneously for a fraction of the cost of competing solutions," said Jerry Porter, VP of Production Operations at Silverpop.

Silverpop is the leader in dynamic email marketing campaigns, ranked by JupiterResearch as the email service provider with the highest overall value for emailers with lists of over 150,000 recipients. The company's clients include leading enterprises such as Fossil, The Bombay Company, British Sky Broadcasting, Weather.com, Golfsmith and more.

Silverpop's storage requirements are driven by hundreds of simultaneously targeted email campaigns in which each message and all responses are minutely tracked, analyzed and archived online over several years. Silverpop sought an enterprise storage platform that would be simple to use, provide massive headroom for strong business growth, support multiple storage tiers and deliver high levels of throughput. The company selected two 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers to support multiple Oracle® databases as well as custom applications across dozens of Sun™ Solaris™ and Linux servers.

3PAR provides Silverpop with a flexible tiered-storage environment that saves time and money by allowing campaign data to be aged seamlessly as demand diminishes. As needs change, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization is used to transition older and less frequently accessed data between storage tiers, online and without performance impact. For example, campaign data that starts out its data lifecycle on Fibre Channel drives can later be moved to more economical Nearline drives on the same system. 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, which automates the conversion from one data service level to another, eliminates traditional planning and configuration efforts while maximizing cost efficiency.

"With 3PAR, configuration is as simple as point-and-click. 3PAR Utility Storage has enabled us to reduce the time spent on storage administration by at least 80 percent. It has saved us from having to hire two additional full-time storage administrators," said Bob Keheller, Senior Network Engineer for Silverpop.

3PAR's massively parallel architecture with mixed-workload support has significantly enhanced campaign service levels for Silverpop. The company can better accommodate the unpredictable peak load times that are inherent in overlapping email campaigns. With 3PAR's support for mixed workloads, Silverpop now has the freedom to perform routine administrative jobs while serving production workloads. A single InServ now performs 2.4-terabyte backups in less than four hours without any impact to production--a task that previously required two arrays and 22 hours to complete.

3PAR's clustered InSpire® Architecture with independently upgradeable performance and capacity has no trouble matching the rapid pace at which Silverpop's business grows. Silverpop has already completed a simple and non-disruptive online upgrade of the 3PAR system from 50 to 75 terabytes in less than thirty minutes. "With 3PAR, upgrades that took 10-12 hours to set up on other arrays become a 5 minute update without downtime," commented Silverpop's Porter.

"Service Providers with huge storage requirements like Silverpop require the most efficient data center possible to stay competitive," said Dianne McAdam, Director Enterprise Information Assurance at The Clipper Group, Inc. "3PAR's solutions allow storage providers to reduce costs and remain competitive."

"Silverpop is a great example of how 3PAR is delivering significant cost-savings advantages to key players in the service provider industry," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "We strive to ensure that service providers who standardize on 3PAR can deliver the most cost-effective storage environment to their own customers. It's a 'win-win' for everyone involved."

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.