3PAR®, the leading vendor of Utility Storage solutions, today announced record performance numbers in the SPC-1 benchmark that are twice the nearest competitor, new customer wins following the completion of a highly successful customer Beta-testing program, and the selection of IBM Global Services to augment the company's aggressive customer service strategy.

The Proof is in the Benchmark: 3PAR Claims Verified
Smashing the previous record by 2X, 3PAR announced today an SPC-1 performance benchmark of 47,001 SPC-1 IOPS™ and SPC-1 Price-Performance of $34.65/SPC-1 IOPS™ at a total ASU capacity of 4,444 gigabytes (Data Protection Level of Mirrored). Notably, 3PAR's Utility Storage systems have outstripped marks posted from Monolithic and Modular array suppliers by as much as 6 times. The SPC-1 benchmark is meant to represent real-world application loads. Likewise, the 3PAR configuration measured was also meant to be representative of what an enterprise IT manager would demand: a substantial configuration of several hundred disk drives; availability features such as mirrored write caching; and the exercising of a substantial portion of the useable capacity.

"Anything less is benchmarking smoke and mirrors," said Craig Nunes, Senior Director of Product Marketing. "Don't assume all storage vendors are using the same standards, as some are overcompensating for architectural shortcomings."

"The 3PAR result is an excellent validation of the SPC-1 benchmark, which is meant to give a performance measurement on all storage platforms on common terms," according to Randy Kerns, a partner at the Evaluator Group. "The performance of the 3PAR Utility Storage system raises the bar for other vendors and offers IT managers unique opportunities for storage consolidation by the ability to scale performance and offer capacity."

The First Utility Storage Systems Sold: Validation of the Promise
3PAR's success in quickly selling five systems is a clear indicator that 3PAR InServ® Utility Storage products are addressing a glaring pain-point in the market. 3PAR counts Fortune 1000 company VERITAS, and enterprise IT services firm, RagingWire telecommunications, among its first paying customers. The company has sold five Utility Storage systems to date, including a large 3PAR InServ S800 system complete with 240 disk drives.

VERITAS, a storage industry titan, selected the 3PAR InServ Storage Server in a storage consolidation project, effectively eliminating a complex 10-JBOD SAN environment.

"We purchased a 3PAR system because of its ability to handle our need for mixed workload support, its modular scalability and its excellent ease of management. We now have the capability to support development and performance workloads on a single, consolidated, shared pool of storage. The granular scalability of 3PAR allows us to provision storage assets according to our needs and provides flexible and cost-effective upgrades for capacity, connectivity and performance," said Ashvin Kamaraju, Director of File Systems Engineering, VERITAS Software.

RagingWire's purchase of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server underscores the need for Utility Storage in an advanced, next-generation datacenter environment. The 3PAR InServ Storage Server has been deployed in RagingWire's class A datacenter in Northern California.

"A key differentiator for RagingWire is having the ability to offer highly customized and flexible IT services that meet the business needs of large, enterprise-class companies," said Yatish Mishra, President and Chief Technology Officer of RagingWire Telecommunications, Inc., a leading provider of world-class managed services and IT infrastructure. "Our purchase of the 3PAR InServ provides us with the simplified storage management needed to rapidly respond to our clients' request in seconds rather than hours or days, cost-effectively scale to their growing needs, and deliver simple provisioning and administration at very competitive costs."

"Our success with customers, both Beta and paid, in a tough economic climate indicates that Utility Storage is addressing the very real storage crisis in the market" said 3PAR CEO David Scott. The storage crisis, referred to by Scott and reinforced by several leading industry analyst firms, is the estimated 50% annual growth in storage demand while IT budgets are being cut or remain flat.

"We're watching the development of the Utility Storage market very closely," said Nick Allen, Vice President and Research Director of analyst firm Gartner, Inc. "We're seeing more and more companies facing opposing pressures. On the one hand, they need to improve their utilization of data in a high growth environment. On the other hand, they need to drive down IT budgets and deal with the scarcity of expert database administrators and storage administrators. Utility Storage may be a solution to this dilemma, and 3PAR is one of the leading vendors in this rapidly emerging category".

"In addition to our customer successes," continued Scott, "the record benchmark shows that the 3PAR InSpire® Architecture, a third generation mesh architecture, packs the performance that end-users need in order to consolidate storage resources and independently scale up storage capacity, connectivity and performance. Utility Storage eliminates the problems caused by trying to implement consolidation using current Modular and Monolithic storage technologies never designed for this purpose."

The 3PAR Utility Storage solution has already proven itself in Beta tests at 12 sites including marquee customers. Even with critical budget pressures, these customers were willing to invest in testing a 3PAR InServ Storage Server. Of those customers, five were Fortune 100 companies, including AIG, Prudential Financial, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and EDS. In total, seven sites were Fortune 500 firms.

"As a leading services provider, EDS believes new capabilities in Utility Storage are key to the future of the industry," said David Benners, Director of Enterprise Hosting, EDS. "As a result, we participated in 3PAR's beta program and were able to validate for ourselves much of their product's functionality. We expect 3PAR's capabilities will help push this emerging technology further into the mainstream computing market."

The common thread binding these companies is the information intensive nature of their operations that now demands a better way to store and manage their strategic data. Even in difficult economic times, companies are testing innovative new technologies that help them provide access to company information across the entire enterprise. Legacy systems are not scalable and versatile enough to do this, so companies acknowledge that something new is needed.

Through its ability to connect to many different hosts and scale from the mid-range to hundreds of terabytes (TB), the 3PAR InServ Storage Server delivers up to three times the capacity and five times the performance of competing systems. Customers are able to dramatically cut their total cost of ownership for storage and save more than $1 million for each 10TB of usable capacity deployed on a 3PAR Utility Storage server over a three-year period.

3PAR and IBM Strike Strategic Relationship
To support its growing customer base, 3PAR has spent several millions of dollars to develop a proactive, remote support infrastructure, and organization capable of delivering technical services 24x7, while at the same time de-skilling the actions that need to be taken locally. The innovative tools-based approach has allowed 3PAR to incorporate a 3-year hardware warranty, inclusive of 4-hour response, right into the base product offering.

Building on this commitment to customer service, 3PAR also announced that it has signed an International Technical Support Agreement (ITSA) with IBM Global Services, adding IBM to its already substantial list of strategic corporate partners. Under this agreement, IBM Global Services will use its industry leading service capability and broad base of storage experience to provide on-site maintenance to U.S.-based 3PAR customers. The principal elements of the agreement include:

By deploying these in a coordinated way, 3PAR and IBM can ensure that the right person and right part arrive at the customer site together.

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly clustered, and dynamically tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications. For more information, visit the 3PAR Website at: www.3PAR.com.

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