THE DISEASE OF STORAGE COMPLEXITY—
IS THERE A CURE?

3PAR Utility Storage is the cure for the "Disease of Complexity" in storage environments today

It’s out there, lurking, silently growing, and ready to overtake your data center. It’s a complexity disease caused by using traditional storage technologies to address the demands and capacity requirements of today’s IT environments. Attempting to adapt towards a virtualized environment with add-on software and hardware technologies only exacerbates the complexity.

How do you know if you’ve caught the complexity disease? Maybe you’ve begun to feel the symptoms:

• Ever-increasing work hours
• Growing pains felt by increasing demands within the IT infrastructure
• Rising administrative costs
• Dissatisfied users
• Unfinished projects

In an effort to utilize information more effectively, organizations have had to pursue physical and logical storage consolidation. In the process, they find themselves lured into adding extra layers of hardware and software to their storage architectures. These layers are necessary solely to overcome the limitations of mid-range modular and high-end monolithic storage arrays.

Examples include non-array-based volume management, storage resource management, information lifecycle management and virtualization software. This add-on functionality is often located on hosts, switches or separate appliances. Other examples include separate storage array architectures for different quality of service solutions, multiple storage arrays within each class of service and continually sprawling switch fabrics. The result is a seething crisis of complexity.

Purchasing these additional layers also adds to capital and operating expenses for license fees, product purchases and additional administration overhead. In turn, this has led to increasing reliance on highly trained storage IT personnel.

The complexity of the multi-layered enterprise storage solution also results in a very brittle environment. One change of driver version or addition of a new product may require careful retesting, QA and scheduling downtime for the IT environment. These activities delay the ability of IT to respond to the organization's needs with the agility that today's competitive environments demand.

Now there is a better way. 3PAR Utility Storage solves the disease of complexity with a new approach to virtualized environments.

Out with the old...
Over the years, IT has undergone a paradigm shift, moving from mainframes to distributed computing and now to Utility Computing. Old storage architectures were not built to adequately address the new Utility Computing environments.
This new Utility Computing paradigm is about doing more with less. And 3PAR Utility Storage is leading the way.

3PAR Utility Storage simplifies your environment, enabling you to securely consolidate your storage assets and centralize information from multiple lines of business and departments for your enterprise-scale applications. See the AMS case study for an example (.pdf).

3PAR Utility Storage solutions also provide unprecedented levels of availability, scalability, performance and density while dramatically reducing the costs associated with purchasing, deploying, upgrading and managing storage.
See the Infinity Pharmaceutical case study for an example (.pdf)

With 3PAR Utility Storage, you can start with small, affordable deployments. By provisioning service levels once, your solution can scale within a single system to meet the most demanding projects, including storage consolidation and support for performance-intensive applications.

Pay only for what you use, when you use it. And restore simplicity to your open-system online storage environment. Why put a bandage over the symptoms when you can have the cure?

For more information
White Paper: 3PAR Utility Storage—Now and Beyond
Computer Business Review: Virtually Yours
InfoStor: 3PAR Streamlines Provisioning

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