3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Thomas Weisel Partners (TWP), a leading merchant bank focused exclusively on the growth sectors of the economy, has adopted the 3PAR InServ Storage Server to consolidate and protect mission critical Oracle, messaging and file-based data.
The San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto-based firm selected 3PAR over other vendors for simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.
"3PAR Utility Storage has been a relief for our organization," said Larry Sikon, Chief Information Officer at 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."
By consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage, Thomas Weisel Partners also made significant gains in capacity utilization. For applications taking advantage of 3PAR Thin Provisioning with dedicate-on-write technology, utilization of allocated capacity now approaches 100%. Previously in TWP's storage environment, consisting of traditional monolithic and direct attached storage with dedicate-on-allocation technology, utilization of allocated capacity was 30%, just above average according to surveys.
Additionally, the company dramatically cut the cost of implementing and managing its disaster recovery plan, a key requirement for all financial services firms. The simple, native Ethernet-based approach of 3PAR's Remote Copy software meant Thomas Weisel Partners avoided the substantial cost of consulting services and incremental equipment typically associated with array-based mirroring systems.
Meeting its need for a simple, shared storage environment, Thomas Weisel Partners consolidated and connected over a dozen servers to a single InServ Storage Server in each location. This saved the company not only the investment in a redundant, switched SAN environment, but also the resulting training, expense and ongoing management for such an infrastructure. In concert with its storage consolidation project, multiple host applications were moved to Linux. The built-in and precisely-tuneable volume management functionality of the 3PAR InForm Operating System saved the firm the cost and support of separate volume managers in its Linux host servers.
"Highly virtualized and scalable arrays offer significant benefits for financial services and a viable path to the Real Time Infrastructure," said Roger Cox, Vice President of Research with the Gartner Group. "Customers should evaluate the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of these solutions carefully."
After considering modular array alternatives from traditional vendors, Thomas Weisel Partners selected 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers for both its San Francisco and New York locations. Due to the inherent efficiencies of 3PAR Thin Provisioning, the InServ Storage Servers were configured with half the raw capacity required by competing alternatives. Thomas Weisel Partners also selected 3PAR Multipath I/O for Microsoft Windows for standards-based, cost effective data availability, foregoing more proprietary and costly multipathing solutions. The company now runs all Oracle, Exchange and file services company-wide on 3PAR Utility Storage, achieving a new level of consolidated storage environment. Data is mirrored approximately 3,000 miles between sites using 3PAR Remote Copy.
"3PAR has successfully served the global financial services community, including many Fortune 500 firms, since 2002," said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "The demands of this industry on data availability and cost-effective IT make 3PAR Utility Storage ideal."