Press Releases
The Allant Group Simplifies With 3PAR Utility Storage
Cuts Storage Administrative Costs by 50% And Improves Service Levels
Fremont, CA, US - May 24, 20043PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today the purchase and production deployment of the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server by The Allant Group™, a marketing optimization solution provider that leverages powerful data assets, applications, and highly skilled professionals to maximize marketing spend productivity for their clients. By selecting 3PAR Utility Storage to simplify its dynamic, high-growth data infrastructure, Allant can now service its clients faster, more reliably and at reduced costs.
With storage growth exceeding 30% per year, Allant found it increasingly difficult and time consuming to scale its environment using modular arrays and traditional SAN solutions. Allant sought a highly scalable, flexible, and virtualized storage platform—one that could deliver seamless sharing of resources while reducing administrative complexity. With 3PAR Utility Storage, Allant consolidated numerous applications (including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS) from multiple storage devices onto a single cost-effective InServ Storage Server. As a result, Allant has cut its storage administration burden by over 50%. Allant also calculates that it will save over 25% of its storage acquisition costs over 3 years thanks to 3PAR Thin Provisioning, a unique technology that eliminates wasted capacity.
"3PAR enables us to be more efficient and more responsive at the same time," said Bob Hroma, Director of IT at The Allant Group. "That is good for our customers, and it gives us a competitive advantage. 3PAR offered us true Utility Storage with 'in-the-box' storage management features. Other vendors' storage solutions that we evaluated required complex additional applications or appliances. 3PAR was the obvious solution to simplify our storage services."
Hard Problem
Customers such as ServiceMaster, FTD, and leading credit issuers depend on The Allant Group to provide powerful data assets and applications to maximize marketing spend. Allant helps clients improve customer acquisition and retention through services that include analysis and consulting, data mining, eCRM, list optimization, and database design and development. With constrained IT administration resources, Allant managed scores of heterogeneous servers, including Linux, Windows, Solaris, Netware and Tru64 environments. An early adopter of SAN technology, Allant also utilized multiple switches to access over 12 terabytes of capacity. However, storage growth and interoperability issues began to stress operations by consuming more and more administrative time in order to meet customer expectations.
To resolve this problem, Allant set definitive criteria for a new storage solution. These included the ability to scale capacity and performance as needed, to increase resource utilization, and to reduce administrative effort related to interoperability and configuration optimization. The company also sought a highly flexible and efficient snapshot technology to speed operations through better data sharing and faster recoverability.
Simple Solution
After conducting in-house evaluations of two other major storage suppliers' systems, Allant decided on the 3PAR InServ S800 Storage Server with 17 terabytes of capacity. Allant also purchased the 3PAR InForm® Operating System for simplified virtualization capabilities and 3PAR Virtual Copy for advanced snapshot functionality. Since purchasing the system, Allant has moved all data from its legacy systems onto the 3PAR system. As a result of this consolidation, Allant has been able to dramatically simplify its IT operations. Deploying 3PAR Utility Storage has allowed Allant's storage administrators to pursue high-value activities and has led to greater responsiveness and availability for Allant's customers.
Administrative tasks like provisioning storage and creating file systems now take minutes rather than hours. Some tasks have been eliminated altogether, such as creating RAID sets. By using the InServ's automated volume creation capabilities, administrative workload has not only been eliminated, but performance has improved. Allant has experienced I/O improvements between 50% to 300%, allowing Allant to meet the quick turnaround demands of its clients. With the extremely stable and fault tolerant InServ Storage Server, Allant has improved the availability of its environment. This has meant faster, higher quality results for Allant's clients.
"Many users today are seeking to deploy virtualized storage solutions," commented Randy Kerns of the Evaluator Group. "But users should evaluate these solutions closely to ensure they won't add more complexity than they eliminate. Allant is further proof that 3PAR Utility Storage is a solution that makes effective use of virtualization."
"We're proud to have made an immediate difference at Allant," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "By removing the complexity, they're able to get maximum value from consolidating their information warehouse."
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.
