Press Releases
Cbeyond Maximizes Storage Efficiency With 3PAR Thin Provisioning
Fast-Growing VOIP Telecom Provider Does More with Less
FREMONT, CA, U.S. — January 18, 2005
3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Cbeyond Communications, a provider of integrated voice, data and internet services, has purchased two 3PAR InServ¨ Storage Servers for its mission-critical operational support systems and its test and development environment. The Atlanta-based firm, which serves over 15,000 businesses in major metropolitan areas, selected 3PAR over other storage vendors based on performance, scalability, simplicity and unmatched cost effectiveness.
"We have achieved substantial savings with 3PAR's Thin Provisioning," said Allen Thomas, Senior Director of System Operations at Cbeyond. "3PAR Thin Provisioning allowed us to permanently eliminate the waste associated with unused allocated capacity and has dramatically simplified storage provisioning. Since 3PAR, I can't think of the last time we worried about storage."
Cbeyond is a voice and broadband Internet provider built exclusively to serve small businesses (4 to 200 employees) using Voice over Internet Protocol technology. Cbeyond serves customers in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Houston and Chicago and delivers an integrated product that offers high-speed T-1 Internet access, local and long distance voice services, web hosting, email, conference calling and VPN.
Cbeyond's prior storage environment consisted of assorted embedded disk, direct attached storage (DAS), and filers from a variety of major vendors. This older environment yielded lower performance, unusable islands of storage capacity and overall architectural inflexibility. In the past, Cbeyond's IT staff addressed these inefficiencies manually through a progressively intensive administrative effort, which took time from value-add activities.
The old storage environment also made it more difficult to maintain identical test and production systems, slowing the introduction of new applications and features. The performance of its prior filer-based database created unnecessary administrative burdens for the completion of bi-monthly billing processes. To ease this burden, Cbeyond set out to find a storage solution that would improve performance and scalability. Cbeyond also had an essential financial requirement to create a pay-as-you grow utility infrastructure to eliminate over-provisioning.
After evaluating storage solutions from larger vendors, Cbeyond ultimately selected two 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers with 9 terabytes of capacity each -- one for production network support systems and the other for test and development. For its many applications that utilize 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Cbeyond was able to purchase half the capacity required by competing vendors' solutions. 3PAR Thin Provisioning lets users provision application storage once and purchase raw capacity only for written data. In addition, Cbeyond estimates it has avoided the investment of two full time storage administrators by selecting the easy-to-manage 3PAR InServ with Thin Provisioning. By leveraging the InServ Storage Server's abundant native connectivity and volume management capabilities, Cbeyond has also eliminated the additional cost and complexity of SAN switching and host volume management associated with fifty Linux and Solaris hosts.
Cbeyond was also able to improve the performance over its prior systems and purchase fewer storage arrays by taking advantage of 3PAR's unique asymmetrical virtualization technology, which simultaneously provides high performance for both transaction and throughput-intensive workloads. On a single InServ Storage Server, Cbeyond consolidated multiple diverse workloads, including transaction-intensive Oracle applications, throughput-intensive billing processes, ad hoc reporting and snapshot-based backup.
"The mixed workload support is like having a dedicated storage array for each application," commented Thomas.
Additionally, Cbeyond chose 3PAR Virtual Copy for flexible and efficient array-based snapshots. With 3PAR Virtual Copy, Cbeyond has increased Oracle availability by taking hourly and non-disruptive snapshots of their Oracle database, and by affordably retaining them for one week to enable rapid recovery from multiple points in time. Virtual Copy has also allowed Cbeyond to perform non-disruptive, off-host backups of Oracle on a daily basis.
"3PAR Utility Storage lets companies like Cbeyond substantially cut their total cost of data," said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "Our customers are able to free up human resources, purchase far less capacity and eliminate devices and layers from their SAN. With this deployment, Cbeyond has joined a rapidly growing group of satisfied Utility Storage customers enjoying significant cost savings."
About Cbeyond Communications
Cbeyond Communications is a privately held, Atlanta-based managed services provider in the emerging local voice and broadband services market using a 100% Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) local phone network. Using VoIP and a 100% Cisco network, Cbeyond delivers to small business customers in Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Houston and Chicago an integrated package of high quality local and long distance telephony services, high-speed Internet access and Internet-based applications. For more information on Cbeyond Communications, www.cbeyond.net.
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.
