3PAR CUSTOMER BASE TOPS 100

3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that enthusiastic adoption of its storage array has pushed it well past a significant milestone its 100th customer mark. Last quarter, MySpace.com, one of the largest online communities focused on youth-oriented social networks, became 3PARs 100th customer. 3PAR sailed past this significant milestone with the support of discerning and innovative IT organisations. Customers include financial services companies like Merrill Lynch, Thomas Weisel Partners and Brevan Howard Asset Management; service providers like SAVVIS Communications and MCI Enterprise Hosting; and leading Internet companies like Priceline.com, eHarmony, Shopzilla and MySpace.com. Overall, more than 50% of 3PARs customers are Fortune 1000, Fortune Global 500, or large government agencies. 25% of 3PARs customer base is located outside of the United States.

3PAR systems have become a strategic and trusted standard for mission-critical online storage deployments around the world, with some customers relying on 3PAR for 100% of their corporate data. Dozens of systems have been implemented as part of disaster recovery (DR) deployments, with installations separated by as many as 5,000 miles. The largest DR deployment is 140 terabytes (70 terabytes replicated). Numerous single systems have been purchased between 100 and 150 terabytes, and multiple customers have deployed a double-digit number of systems globally.

3PAR has demonstrated to the most conservative IT buyers in the world that it can support their global information infrastructures with exceptional availability, world-class service and far greater efficiency than traditional storage array vendors, said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR.

Customers are amassing tangible benefits unachievable with traditional array technologies by moving their mission-critical data to 3PAR arrays, purpose-built for utility computing environments. In particular, these organisations have gained dramatic improvements in responsiveness while realising unmatched levels of cost efficiency and administrative simplicity. Self-configuring and self-optimising, the 3PAR InServ Storage Server also cuts capacity purchases by up to 75% through its market-leading Thin Provisioning technology.

We purchased 3PAR because the benefits were significant enough to warrant a shift away from traditional enterprise storage technologies. Provisioning is ridiculously simple and the scalability can match the rapid growth of our business, said Aber Whitcomb, Chief Technology Officer at MySpace. Its clear to us that 3PAR has something very special and is increasingly becoming well-established with high-growth companies like ours.

3PAR customers routinely state that Utility Storage has cut 80% to 95% of their administrative time. Customers experiencing these savings include matchmaker eHarmony, merchant bank Thomas Weisel Partners and the U.S. Census Bureau. With the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, formerly complex tasks are completed in just seconds, like storage provisioning and making data copies for sharing.

3PAR Utility Storage has been a relief for our organisation, said Larry Sikon, CIO of Thomas Weisel Partners. We can now apply 95% fewer resources to storage administration, and we are rid of the high price premiums associated with monolithic arrays.

Customers have also praised the capacity-saving virtue of 3PAR Thin Provisioning, including global hosting company SAVVIS Communications, hedge fund manager Brevan Howard, online grocer FreshDirect, and global advertising and communications firm WPP Group. 3PAR Thin Provisioning reduces disk capacity requirements and associated costs by consuming physical disk capacity only for written data on an as-needed basis. Traditional storage arrays force users to allocate physical disk capacity well in advance of actual needs, leading to a substantial waste of disk capacity and poor capacity utilisation rates of just 25% or less. 3PAR Thin Provisioning drives capacity utilisation towards 100%.

Its fantastic that 3PAR has moved beyond the realm of start-ups and is delivering Utility Storage to more than a hundred large, sophisticated shops, said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group. "3PAR is proof that a young company with exceptional people and products can thrive in a market dominated by large organisations."