Press Releases
3PAR Extends Utility Storage With 500 Gigabyte Nearline Disk Drives
FREMONT, CA, US — December 13, 2005
3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, today announced that 500 gigabyte Nearline drives are now available, extending 3PAR Utility Storage across both Fibre Channel and Nearline storage tiers. These high-capacity, low-cost drives broaden the consolidation value of 3PAR Utility Storage to a new set of applications, including archiving, backup caching, and lower cost replication.
Unlike traditional ATA-class drives, which would require distinct drive enclosures, 3PAR Nearline drives embed a Fibre Channel interface and are supported within the same enclosure as the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server's Fibre Channel disk drives. Customers can enjoy the cost savings of adding Nearline-class drives to the InServ, a tiered-storage array, simply and efficiently, with no incremental enclosure investment.
3PAR Nearline disk drives offer a cost-effective alternative to Fibre Channel drives for select applications and address many of the drawbacks associated with similarly inexpensive ATA drives. Some benefits of Nearline drives over ATA include the following:
- Higher reliability: Nearline drives are rated for higher mean time between failure (MTBF) and for more rigorous duty cycles with near-continuous 24x7 workloads.
- Higher availability: Nearline drives include dual-ported Fibre Channel paths and control logic for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on disk drive health.
- Higher performance: Nearline drives include several performance enhancing features, including optimized command queuing and full duplex access.
When combined with 3PAR Utility Storage—a cost-effective, massively scalable, and now fully-tiered storage array—the advantages of Nearline drives are even greater. The 3PAR InServ Storage Server can provide a variety of data service levels (performance, availability, cost) by application volume and, with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, can move these volumes across tiers online and non-disruptively, with a single command. A tiered storage implementation has never been easier.
"The addition of Nearline drives to 3PAR's InServ Storage Server is the latest in an impressive build-out of 3PAR's utility computing vision," said Anne MacFarland, Director of Infrastructure Architectures and Solutions at The Clipper Group. "Now, 3PAR InServ users can consolidate the stored data of more applications in a single environment—and, for some enterprises, in a single enclosure."
"Customers quickly realize that they can enjoy tremendous cost benefits by consolidating storage tiers with 3PAR Utility Storage," said David Scott. "With Dynamic Optimization, Thin Provisioning, fast RAID 5, and now Nearline drives, 3PAR lets enterprise customers stretch their capacity budgets farther than anyone."
The 500 gigabyte Nearline disk drives for the 3PAR InServ Storage Server are available today.
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.
