NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S STORAGE

A primer on storage virtualization

Data is growing—doubling every eight to twelve months, with no foreseeable end in sight. This makes storage a challenge, and requires new technology for data storage. Your grandfather’s storage solutions just don’t cut it any longer!

A growing trend—virtualization—enables you to negotiate and simply manage your storage. This separates your physical assets from your logical assets, enabling you to manage external storage as a single pool, which in turn simplifies management. You can move, manage and even replicate data both simply and efficiently.

Benefits
According to Gartner, virtualization “creates a level of indirection or an abstraction layer between a physical object and the managing or using application.” They define storage virtualization as the presentation of a simple file, logical volume or other storage object (like a disk drive) to an application in such a way that allows the physical complexity of the storage to be hidden from both the storage administrator and the application.

The key benefits of storage virtualization are easier, flexible administration and better utilization of resources. The Enterprise Strategy Group, from its survey of hundreds of companies that moved to some form of storage virtualization, reports the following cost savings:

• Average hardware savings of 24% (with some companies saving up to 60 and 70%)
• Average software savings of 15%
• Average storage administration savings of 19%

3PAR's highly scalable and uniquely virtualized InServ Storage Server has enabled numerous customers, including dozens of Fortune & Global 1000s, to cut storage administration by 90% and capacity costs up to 75%. The massively addressable and finely virtualized capacity in the Storage Server also provides seamless, maximum resource utilization by enabling unique dedicate-on-write capabilities. While logically presenting, or allocating, lifetime capacity to host servers, the InServ Storage Server configures and dedicates purchased capacity to applications only when writes occur. By contrast, traditional devices require that all allocated capacity, by application, be configured and dedicated up front!

Approaches to virtualization
There are four approaches to virtualization:

1. Host-based (host volume management)
2. Network-based (such as appliances like the IBM SAN Volume Controller)
3. Traditional array-based (such as the HP EVA or XIOTech Magnitude)
4. Utility Storage-based

3PAR delivers this last and best form of virtualization. The 3PAR advantage stems from "array-based fine-grained virtualization," an implementation of virtualization that leverages direct access and control over the physical resources and geometry of the system. By finely and logically segmenting disk drive resources into 256MB "chunklets," 3PAR Utility Storage provides unique benefits in simplicity and efficiency. 3PAR does not virtualize other vendors' arrays. Virtualizing other arrays adds to complexity and cost, creating more layers for the same or lower service levels. Heterogeneous LUN management can be more broadly and cost-effectively deployed with SMI-S enabled Enterprise Management or Storage Resource Management (SRM) platforms like Creekpath, AppIQ or IBM/Tivoli.

More power through partners
Moreover, 3PAR teams with utility computing partners to deliver the full promise of virtualization throughout the data center. SAVVIS Communications, a leading application service provider, and FreshDirect™, a leading E-commerce provider in New York, both deployed utility computing environments with 3PAR as the foundation, and reaped the benefits immediately. SAVVIS has estimated that it has cut 50% from the traditional ASP model by building a highly virtualized hosting infrastructure based on 3PAR.

Together, 3PAR and its utility computing partners offer the solution building blocks and consulting services needed to implement simple, efficient, and scalable utility computing datacenters for application, hosting, and network services. One partner solution is with Egenera™. The Egenera BladeFrame system leads the industry in both blade server technology and virtualization software by enabling datacenters to run any application, on any resource, at any time, automatically. This virtualized storage and server solution is economically disruptive and simple to provision and manage.

With partner Inkra Networks, 3PAR delivers breakthrough virtualized storage and networking solutions for utility computing datacenters. Inkra is the leading provider of virtualized network and security infrastructure. Inkra's Virtual Service Switch integrates and virtualizes critical networking and security services such as firewall, load balancing, intrusion detection and prevention (IDP), virtual private networking (VPN) and more onto a single, centrally managed platform.

Is it right for me?
How do you know if 3PAR is right for your company? Start by answering these questions:

• Do you see your department/company as a service provider (internally or externally)?
• Do you have an information-intensive business model?
• Do you foresee a project of 3TB or more in your future?
• Are you expecting significant growth?
• Are you having difficulty meeting service levels?
• Do you expect to be implementing server or storage consolidation?
• Are you having trouble leveraging your corporate information?

If you answered "yes" to any of these, 3PAR Utility Storage may be right for you. With it, you can reduce the time, cost and expertise required for IT management, planning and training from weeks to just minutes. You can substantially improve your IT service levels to meet your business needs while reducing or altogether eliminating IT capital and support costs. And you can drive your IT asset utilization to over 80% while reducing your capacity expenses by two to three times!

With virtualization, you can transparently and easily migrate your data. Are you a candidate for Utility Storage? Ask yourself. If so, let's talk.

For more information
Storage virtualization audiocast
3PAR virtualization solutions
3PAR/Egenera solution
Customer implementation with SAVVIS
Other Utility Computing Partners

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