The benefits of virtualization - server or storage - start to loose some of their shine as organizations come to grips with the reality of actually managing a virtualized environment. As the move from implementation to management, the hidden issues of managing virtualized environments become clearly exposed. It is for these reasons that storage providers like 3PAR are more tightly integrating their InServ Storage Servers with VMware's vCenter Server management console to provide better management of virtual data centers. (read more)

Good times or bad, all size organizations need data storage. The difference is that when times get tough as they were in 2009, we start to see those storage providers that deliver a good value for the dollar get the nod over those that deliver only so-so value. But what is notable about 3PAR, which recently received some positive comments from Barron's, is that 3PAR is making inroads in the high end of the storage market where start-ups are not supposed to succeed. (read more)

As customers add more storage capacity in the form of disk drives to a storage system, they might also want to take advantage of the additional performance benefits that these new disk drives can deliver. The 3PAR array is architected in such a way that as resources are added to the system, the performance of all volumes improves. To achieve this, the volume needs to span as many disk drives in the storage system as possible - existing and new. While accomplishing this is simply done with its Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR saw an opportunity for policy management and multi-volume automation to further accelerate such tasks. (read more)

High-profile case studies about companies such as Google and Amazon document how they are leveraging the cost reductions that clustered virtualized servers make possible to improve reliability, scalability, performance and capacity. But as the clustering of virtualized servers becomes more prevalent for these reasons, the overhead associated with storage administration in these environments only increases. Provisioning storage volumes to clustered virtualized servers calls for more upfront planning; it takes longer due to the complexity involved; and, the probability of human error becomes difficult to avoid. (read more)

This past summer a rather humorous video debate broke out on the StorageRap and RupturedMonkey.com blog sites. The debate centered on the 42 MB page size of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Dynamic Provisioning feature (HDS's implementation of thin provisioning) and the 16K block size of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server thin provisioning technology. (read more)

Cloud computing helps companies hide, intelligently allocate and take control of their IT infrastructure while also supplying users with the appropriate levels of application availability and performance. But, with this flexibility comes the inherent risks. One of the most pronounced risks is protecting the application data stored in the cloud because if you don't, cloud storage horror stories are sure to follow. (read more)

Since many companies have not had this luxury of starting off thin, 3PAR has, in today's announcement, released four new products that will make it easier for companies to adopt thin provisioning even if they are already using fat volumes and then stay thin. The (read more)

The question of FC or ATA disk is now a moot point as 3PAR makes use of, and has for a while, a FC-to-SATA bridge that enables high-capacity ATA drives to be integrated into its storage arrays that provides customers like CEDAR a low-cost but highly available storage infrastructure for even the most demanding application loads. (read more)

At a time where vendors are positioning savings "guarantees" to draw attention to their storage offering, it is refreshing to see a storage user actually tout substantive savings just by switching to 3PAR. This was accomplished recently done by CEDAR Document Technologies who announced it saved a half a million dollars, improved performance, experienced a 5x increase in transaction volumes and avoided $250,000 in administrative costs just by switching to 3PAR's InServ storage systems. (read more)

Again, I have nothing against deduplication when used appropriately and other factors are uncontrollable. But in a properly architected database I am still skeptical about the fit. Databases are just too dynamic with temporary sort, rollback, and redo areas and high transaction rates that make me question what there could possibly be to dedup in the first place. (read more)