3PAR LAUNCHES DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION

At 3PAR we are relentless in our search to find new ways for customers using Utility Storage to improve business responsiveness while reducing costs. We describe it as serving more with less. We believe that the most effective way to achieve these goals is by making storage solutions simple and efficient. This remains our guiding mission statement.

In 2003 we transformed business flexibility and cost effectiveness by introducing Thin Provisioning, a solution that drives storage utilization efficiency towards 100%. 3PAR Thin Provisioning allows applications to grow storage usage dynamically, without disruption and without administrative overhead. With Thin Provisioning, customers can minimize storage costs for all applications at the specific data service level (Quality of Service) that been assigned to those applications.

But requirements change. An additional way to minimize costs is to optimize the data service levels allocated to individual applications as the demands of those applications change over the business lifecycle. For example, an increased data service level may be required temporarily during peak processing periods at the end of the quarter or during holiday seasons. More permanently, a higher data service level may be required if a new business initiative supported by an application is wildly successful following an initial ramp period. Or, alternatively, an application may have matured to a stage where its transaction rates have started to naturally reduce over time and now it is more appropriate to move it to a lower data service level. If you could change data service levels on the fly, you could reduce the cost of storing data over time by up to 80%.

Now, with the introduction of 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, you can. With a single command, a 3PAR customer can convert service levels online and without disruption to the performance of a running application. These service level tiers can be differentiated by RAID level, radial data placement on disk platters, level of use of parallelized storage controller resources and even different disk classes. These disk classes include traditional high capacity and high performance Fibre Channel enterprise-class disks as well as our newly-announced support for a new generation of ATA-class drives designed for nearline and archival usage.

Anyone who has contemplated applying data migration techniques to move data between different classes of storage arrays will understand how complex and inefficient these approaches to service level optimization can be. In fact, they are so hard to use that organizations often don’t take advantage of them, remaining saddled with sub-optimized service levels and unnecessary costs. Dynamic Optimization is exactly the opposite approach. It is simple and efficient. With Dynamic Optimization, you never have to leave your storage capacity sub-optimized again.

Please take the opportunity to browse this issue of Plugged In to learn more about Dynamic Optimization and other exciting things happenings here at 3PAR.

Enjoy!
David Scott
3PAR President and CEO