The first acquaintance with 3Par

On December 1, HP began accepting orders for 3Par disk arrays, which were included in the HP StorageWorks lineup as a result of the purchase of a company of the same name specializing in the development of virtualized storage systems.

First, a small historical background. 3Par was founded in 1999 by three former leading Sun Microsystems server department engineers Jeffrey Price, Ashok Singhal and Robert Rogers and the company name is formed from the first letters of the names of the three of its founders (Price / Ashok / Robert).

The company launched its first disk array with powerful virtualization features of InServ in September 2002, and since then more than 6,000 companies and organizations have become its customers, and the total capacity delivered to InServ customers exceeded 100 PB. Large amounts of data on InServ store both traditional buyers of enterprise-class storage systems (banks, industry and government institutions), as well as large service providers. For example, 3 of the 10 largest global providers use 3Par products.
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Although in recent years, 3Par has been actively developing its business in the Old World, so far it has not had partners in Russia. But now Russian customers will be able to purchase InServ through HP channels.


3Par InServ Disk Array

The powerful virtualization features of InServ, which were originally incorporated into the architecture of the first generation of these disk arrays, make them an ideal platform for serving cloud computing, which require fast and flexible allocation of disk capacity to several thousand virtual machines. 3Par systems improve storage efficiency by:

• Thin Provisioning Capacity Dynamic Capability, which saves up to 50 percent capacity,
• automatic distribution of data between multiple storage levels with different rates of cost per gigabyte and access speed
• reducing energy consumption and cooling storage costs.

Thanks to the autonomic management functions of InServ, the costs of data storage administration are also significantly reduced. For example, using virtualization, LUN creation takes 15 seconds, simplifies support for service levels for all applications that work with an array (even in case of hardware failures), and the entire system quickly adapts to changing business requirements for applications. Finally, on one InServ using virtual domains can be safely stored data from different departments of the enterprise and even different companies. In more detail about the unique architecture of the hardware and software InServ, which allowed to implement this functionality, we will talk next time.

In the HP StorageWorks lineup, 3Par disk arrays took up space between the P6000 / P8000 modular arrays (ex EVA) and the monolithic P9500 arrays (ex XP). HP positions them primarily as a cloud computing platform. And since, according to forecasts, the share of cloud storage in the general storage system market will increase significantly in the coming years, it seems that, over time, InServ may become the main HP StorageWorks platform for large customers. This is also indicated by the appointment of David Scott, the former 3Par CEO, as the head of the HP StorageWorks division. Nevertheless, the development of EVA and XP will continue - in September, the P9500 came out, and HP StorageWorks executives promise to upgrade the P6000 / P8000 in 2011.