BIG DATA

InServ T-Class Selected as a 2009 Best Products and Services Winner in Storage

3PAR announced today that Network Products Guide has named the 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server with Thin Built In a winner of the 2009 Best Products and Services Award. This respected annual award honors products and services that represent the rapidly changing needs and interests of technology end users worldwide. As part of the tech industry’s leading global awards program, this year’s Best Products and Services award nominees came from all over the world.

The InServ T-Class with Thin Built In

The 3PAR Gen3 ASICs within both the InServ T-Class and F-Class arrays feature a unique Thin Built In™ design to increase capacity utilization while maintaining high service levels. This capability incorporates detection of allocated-but-unused capacity (“zero-detection” capability) into 3PAR InServ arrays. By offering a silicon-based mechanism for fat-to-thin volume conversions, the Gen3 ASIC boosts capacity utilization by removing allocated-but-unused space from traditional storage volumes without impacting array service levels. 3PAR is the first in the industry to commercially ship storage systems with this fat-to-thin capability built into the hardware architecture of its arrays.

In addition to Thin Built In, InServ T-Class arrays incorporate the following features and capabilities:

• Enhanced Performance. The T-Class is the fastest array available today and is the only single-system storage array to achieve 224,989.65 IOPS in a published SPC-1 benchmark—a result obtained with 83% written capacity utilization and without complex configuration or performance tuning.

• Highly Scalable, Load-Balanced Cluster. The T-Class features a high-bandwidth, low-latency backplane that unifies cost-effective, modular, and scalable components into a highly available and autonomically load-balanced cluster. This architecture delivers industry-leading density as well as the ability to scale non-disruptively from 2 Mesh-Active controllers and 16 disk drives to 8 Mesh-Active controllers and 1,280 disk drives within a single system.

• Tightly-Coupled Cluster with Mixed Workload Support. The full-mesh, completely passive backplane provides a dedicated 1.6-Gigabyte per second data path between the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC in each of the system’s clustered controller nodes for a total of 45 Gigabytes per second. This tightly coupled, clustered architecture enables data and metadata processing to be parallelized and distributed so that both transaction-intensive workloads (such as databases) and throughput-intensive workloads (such as data mining and backup) run without contention on the same storage resources. This feature reduces costs by eliminating the need for dedicated arrays or hardware partitions for each workload. Each drive chassis in the system supports both premium Fibre Channel and more economical Serial ATA drives for tiered storage consolidation.

• 3PAR Fast RAID. The T-Class also supports 3PAR Fast RAID 5, which uses the Gen3 ASIC’s silicon-based RAID 5 XOR calculations and high memory bandwidth to deliver performance levels within 10% of RAID 1 but with 66% less RAID capacity overhead.

“Increased end user awareness and ongoing advances in technology are helping shape better products and services,” said Rake Narang, editor-in-chief, Network Products Guide. “The 3PAR InServ T-Class arrays are bringing improvements in performance and capacity utilization while reducing administration and energy consumption. This makes the T-Class the ideal fit for green IT initiatives, cloud computing deployments, and the delivery of enterprise IT as a utility service.”

“We are honored by the recognition from Network Products Guide for bringing to market the world's most powerful virtualized storage array,” said David Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer for 3PAR. “With its unique ‘Thin Built In’ capability, The T-Class provides the highly virtualized storage foundation required to support today’s most demanding virtual datacenters and cloud computing environments.”