CAN ENTERPRISE COMPUTING
BE PURCHASED AS A UTILITY?

Skepticism exists about whether or not enterprise computing can really be effectively delivered like any other type of utility. Take telephone service, for example. What are the requirements for a telephone service? Make it simple to use. Make it available whenever you need it. Maintain excellent service levels during high or low demand periods. And you should only pay for what you use based on a standardized transaction charge. Most utilities differentiate themselves on price and service, including their responsiveness to a customer’s request to change service levels.

The secret to a utility’s success is that it uses technology that was designed specifically for utility-class service demands. Today’s winning telephone utilities did not emerge because they applied the telephone exchange technology used to support an individual company or small town to the vastly different problem of providing a pan-geographic utility. Instead, they leveraged what was at the time a radical new generation of carrier-class PBX technology and used it as the new foundation of these telephone utilities. Later enhancements allowed different levels and types of service to be added on the fly.

In the last few years there have been many false starts at trying to bring hosted service models and utilities to enterprise computing. Many of these attempts have been hampered or have failed because the cost advantage, flexibility and service levels delivered by these would-be utilities proved inadequate in comparison with enterprises continuing to do it on their own. These limitations resulted from an attempt to use the building blocks of traditional enterprise computing within a utility setting. In the storage industry, this has materialized into several Rube Goldberg attempts at creating a utility service by cobbling together traditional monolithic or dual-controller arrays.

3PAR Utility Storage was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of utility computing. As the tailored storage building block for utility computing, Utility Storage has transformed the ability of service providers to develop a new generation of highly competitive enterprise computing utilities. In many cases, capacity and related purchases can be cut by up to 75% while storage administration and associated expenses can be reduced by up to 90%. This means that administrative resources can be freed up to address new tasks that can generate a faster return on investment.

It should not be surprising, then, that about half of 3PAR’s business is with service providers. And many of 3PAR’s large enterprise and government customers are implementing their own internal service provider models using 3PAR Utility Storage.

3PAR delivers a simple, efficient, and scalable tiered-storage array to reduce the economic cost of delivering an enterprise computing utility service by 50%. We have customers such as SAVVIS that have achieved exactly that result in their business models. Over the next decade, the world of enterprise computing will be transformed into a utility service. We are confident that 3PAR Utility Storage will continue to serve as the foundation for the successful enterprise computing utilities that will emerge. Please take the time to browse through this issue of Plugged In to see how this transformation is taking shape today.

Sincerely,
David Scott
3PAR President and CEO