New 3PAR InServ X-Series storage server

3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today shipment of its new InServ X-Series Storage Server. With the performance-enhanced capabilities of the InServ X-Series, new and existing customers can double the consolidation headroom of the industry's most broadly scalable enterprise array. A simple in-box upgrade allows current customers to leave their storage environment undisturbed while extending asset life dramatically. 3PAR also announced the release of its 2.1.1 InForm Operating System, which includes new quality-of-service management tools. In addition, 3PAR introduced a new, simplified Microsoft Exchange data management solution for rapid Exchange backup and granular recovery.

"We needed the simplicity of a single system, but one that would deliver consistent quality of service as we continue to consolidate. 3PAR's InServ does exactly that, and will let us support a dozen or more mission critical database and messaging applications," said Martin O'Reilly, Chief Information Officer of Research International, a world leader in customer market research and part of WPP, one of the world's leading marketing and communications companies.

Demonstrating the power of the new InServ X-Series, 3PAR posted a world-record SPC Benchmark-1(TM) (SPC-1) result that doubles the previous single-system record, a spot held for more than five quarters by the companys own first generation InServ Storage Server. The 3PAR InServ S800 X-Series (8-node) achieved an SPC Benchmark-1 result of 100,045.74 SPC-1 IOPS, an SPC-1 Price-Performance of $14.81/SPC-1 IOPS, and a total ASU capacity of 16,468.673 gigabytes. These results used a data protection level of mirrored, and received an SPC-1 Submission Identifier A00027. The new InServ X-Series features a unique design built around 3PARs patented ASIC and Intel Xeon processors.

The Intel Xeon processor provides the high performance required of demanding storage solutions, said Ton Steenman, General Manager, Embedded Intel Architecture Division. By pairing the Intel Xeon processor with 3PARs unique Utility Storage architecture, 3PAR delivers consistent outstanding performance for next-generation storage applications.

The company also introduced 3PAR Templates, a new quality-of-service tool, offering storage administrators the ability to simply manage multiple applications or departmental service levels from a shared 3PAR InServ Storage Server. With 3PAR Templates, a senior administrator pre-defines a number of quality-of-service attributes (including performance, cost, availability, security, and disk utilization parameters) according to required service levels for different applications or departments. Junior administrators can then quickly provision storage volumes based on these pre-defined attributes. Templates are now a standard part of the latest 3PAR InForm(R) Operating System, version 2.1.1.

3PAR also introduced System Tuner, a management tool that optimizes performance automatically and non-disruptively system-wide, assuring application service levels without requiring human intervention. Disk drives are analyzed and then optimized intelligently and on-the-fly by relocating only minute portions, or hot chunklets. System Tuner comes standard with 3PAR Foundation Suite, which includes the new InForm Operating System, version 2.1.1, and additional software utilities.

These new quality-of-service capabilities extend 3PARs lead in utility computing, said Stephanie Balaouras, Senior Analyst at the Yankee Group. 3PAR is one of the few companies today that delivers on the promise of utility computing.

As one of the fastest growing IT trends in todays market, utility computing initiatives require utility-capable server, networking, and storage platforms. 3PAR is delivering the storage cornerstone of utility computing, as demonstrated by its Utility Storage deployments to date. By doubling the performance of the InServ platform, customers enjoy immediate and substantial storage performance improvements and headroom for their utility computing data centers.

"In the VERITAS performance labs, we measure the performance of VERITAS software solutions using various hardware products," said Glenn Groshans, director, product marketing, VERITAS Software. "When we upgraded to the 3PAR X-Series server in our labs, it demonstrated a substantial increase in transaction throughput and application performance. The in-box upgrade was easy to install, avoiding the installation, reconfiguration, and migration effort of a complete replacement upgrade."

Additionally, 3PAR announced Virtual Copy DBA for Microsoft Exchange, a new offering that solves the traditional dilemmas of Exchange data management. Issues such as diminished service levels and unnecessary IT complexity are eliminated. With this new product, administrators can intelligently create and manage Exchange-aware copy-on-write snapshots. From these snapshots, users can quickly restore or non-disruptively backup Exchange instances or databases. Administrators can restore individual mailboxes or messages quickly and simply, without disruption to the production Exchange instance.

Based on the highly flexible and efficient 3PAR Virtual Copy technology, Virtual Copy DBA for Microsoft Exchange enables users to economically keep scores or hundreds of Exchange images online. Virtual Copys fine-grained auto-growth capability makes it more efficient than other copy-on-write technologies by drawing copy capacity in small increments from free space as needed. This eliminates the traditional need to reserve conservative amounts of copy space on a per-volume basis.