3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Brevan Howard, one of the largest and fastest growing hedge funds in Europe, has selected the 3PAR InServ Storage Server for its mission critical trade entry system. The London-based fund, which manages over 6 billion in assets, selected 3PAR over other vendors according to key selection criteria, including performance, cost-effective storage management, disaster recovery characteristics, and overall platform utility.
"We felt 3PAR was the right choice for us," said Paul Bryant, Head of Technology at Brevan Howard. "3PAR Utility Storage gives us the opportunity to deliver high - and in some cases greater - levels of service with reduced time, expertise, and cost."
Brevan Howard launched in 2002 and has grown quickly to manage over 6 billion, operating with over 130 employees. With this growth, the IT plan called for a high-performance, [d1]and highly scalable storage infrastructure that could be managed simply and flexibly. Disaster recovery capabilities were required to support a geographically disbursed database server platform including Sybase and MS SQL Server environments. To keep human and capital costs down, Brevan Howard required a simple and cost-effective disaster recovery solution that could be managed internally and easily, with no dependency on converters or extenders. Similarly, the company wanted to avoid or at least postpone the cost and complexity of a Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure. Therefore, the main selection criteria included the ability to connect numerous hosts directly to the storage frame, and the ability to replicate data natively over existing IP networks.
The sale to a leading player in London's demanding and conservative financial sector marks continued progress for 3PAR in the United Kingdom. "3PAR continues to gain traction in key vertical markets," said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "After opening our office in the United Kingdom less than a year ago, we have established success in both financial services and the service provider market."
After evaluating monolithic alternatives from leading vendors, Brevan Howard purchased the 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Server. The InServ Storage Server met or exceeded demanding performance requirements in pre-sale testing. The InServ also offered dramatic single-system scalability, allowing Brevan Howard the chance to grow into, not out of, their array. Up to 12 dual-attached hosts could be directly connected to their InServ, as configured, helping Brevan Howard avoid a complex and costly SAN deployment. The evaluation process also demonstrated that 3PAR Utility Storage would take much less time to learn and manage.
"In addition to the initial value-performance proposition of the InServ, we estimated that upgrades costs with 3PAR would be significantly lower per terabyte than with comparable monolithic array environments," commented Bryant. "That was very compelling. And given ever-present space constraints, the degree to which we could scale within a single cabinet was also an advantage."
By selecting 3PAR Remote Copy software with support for replication over native IP, Brevan Howard will be able to leverage their existing IP WAN infrastructure, avoiding the need to implement Fibre Channel connectivity, and associated SAN switches, between data centres. Brevan Howard also chose 3PAR Virtual Copy for non-disruptive backup and rapid recovery capabilities, as well as 3PAR Thin Provisioning, a technology that permanently eliminates the waste associated with allocated-but-unused capacity.
Add a Comment
No messages on this article yet