ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP RECOGNIZES 3PAR

ESG acknowledges 3PAR as the Thin Provisioning pioneer and comments on 3PAR's SMI-S debut.

"Thin provisioning is one of the most useful features that storage vendors can implement because it solves two major problems that administrators face: storage provisioning and capacity planning/utilization. 3PAR has been the leader in bringing this functionality to market."

—Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab

"Storage utilization is a huge problem. While there are a lot of vendors out there pushing their own virtualization solutions to address this, only a few are going to win in the long term. The type of implementation that 3PAR brings to the market is one that has legs. With its SMI-S announcement, 3PAR shows how its customers can get heterogeneous LUN management of their virtualized storage without having to rely on the additional management and interoperability headaches of dedicated appliances."

—Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

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YANKEE GROUP PRAISES 3PAR/ORACLE SOLUTION

Simplifying deployment of high-performing databases

"Increasing complexity threatens to cripple data center operations. If companies are to be competitive, they must turn to solutions that scale rapidly and adjust to the day-to-day demands of the business while optimizing IT resources efficiently and cost-effectively. The Oracle Database 10g and 3PAR Utility Storage solution is just what these companies need to significantly simplify the database and storage environment and enable true utility computing in the data center."

—Stephanie Balaouras, The Yankee Group

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GARTNER TAKES THE MYSTERY OUT
OF STORAGE TERMS

The problems with "storage on demand"

Gartner indicates that while many storage vendors continue to upgrade their storage on-demand offerings, many are just re-engineered leases. However, there is hope. Whereas "storage-on-demand" schemes really just try to make poor capacity utilization easier to finance, solutions such as 3PAR Thin Provisioning optimize capacity utilization.

"The concept of accessing storage capacity as needed and paying only for the number of gigabytes consumed is known by many names, including such terms as "just-in-time storage," "storage on-demand," "pay per use" and "the storage utility"....In other words, "utility" pricing can never be more than pre-provisioned storage draped in an engineered financing instrument: a volume purchase agreement (VPA) on the installment plan…Perhaps the biggest potential pitfall is over-provisioning a storage server with capacity that won't be used for years. This means that a company would be leasing unused storage at today's prices even though it will be far cheaper by the time it is actually needed. There is one last consideration: the cost of powering and cooling disks that are installed in the system, but not yet used."

—Adam Couture and Stan Zaffos, Gartner, Research Brief: Leases Masquerade as On-Demand Storage

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