3PAR announced today that SupplyScape, the leading provider of software designed to secure the safety and value of the global life sciences supply chain, has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage for its Software as a Service (SaaS) application delivery infrastructure. SupplyScape’s SaaS-based solutions for product traceability, end-to-end supply chain visibility, and enhanced business performance based on trade network collaboration serve many of the largest global pharmaceutical companies and their trading partners. Given these strenuous performance demands, SupplyScape is one of many SaaS providers who have chosen the 3PAR Utility Storage platform due to its unique scalability, reliability, and performance benefits. These benefits align particularly well with the strategic business needs of SaaS providers including those using cloud computing service delivery models, such as SupplyScape.

“In order to maintain competitive offerings, SaaS providers must rein in costs while retaining the ability to scale to meet unpredictable but potentially massive data storage requirements,” said Anne MacFarland, Director of I.T. Architectures and Strategies at The Clipper Group, Inc., technology acquisition consultants. “3PAR’s products make this happen with minimal up-front investment.”

“Our previous storage environment was extremely inflexible and required the up-front purchase of large chunks of storage at a time,” said John Kordash, Director of Operations and Architecture for SupplyScape. “Adding capacity was disruptive and forced downtime that jeopardized the integrity of our business. With 3PAR, we made a minimal up-front investment and have been able to grow rapidly, seamlessly, and painlessly as our SaaS adoption has accelerated. Throughout this process, the superior performance and scalability of our 3PAR infrastructure have allowed us to offer aggressive SLAs that have made us the leading provider in this space.”

SupplyScape’s 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure supports the company’s pioneering electronic pedigree, serialized product authentication, supply chain serialization, and trade network collaboration solutions. These solutions use supply-chain events combined with digital signatures and certificates to track pharmaceuticals and medical supplies as they move throughout the supply chain. SupplyScape allows customers to link those product movements to other transactions and business operations.

As the first in the industry to launch an electronic pedigree service—SupplyScape E-Pedigree, SupplyScape needed a storage infrastructure capable of starting small with minimal up-front investment. But they also needed to retain the ability to scale massively and with absolute agility. To replace their inflexible and unreliable Direct Attached Storage (DAS) environment, SupplyScape enlisted help from solution provider Corporate Technologies during the evaluation round, which lead to the purchase of two 3PAR InServ Storage Servers with 3PAR Virtual Copy, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, and 3PAR Thin Provisioning. SupplyScape also purchased 3PAR Remote Copy for simple, affordable, “do-it-yourself” replication between their primary Boston datacenter and a recovery datacenter in Denver.

“With 3PAR we were able to get high-end features such as Remote Copy for disaster recovery and automated Dynamic Optimization capabilities for much less than with other vendors. But perhaps the greatest benefit of our 3PAR systems is the minimal initial investment combined with inherent scalability, which gives us the performance, reliability, and agility that DAS and SANs could not offer us,” said Kordash.

Even as SupplyScape’s customer base has expanded ten-fold, the company has increased performance levels, eliminated downtime for adding storage capacity from a half a day with DAS to zero with 3PAR, and improved capacity utilization by 50% over their previous storage environment. The SaaS provider uses 3PAR Thin Provisioning software to export extremely large volumes to their hosts—volumes many times larger than the actual physical capacity of their 3PAR arrays—and then add physical capacity to their systems as needed, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

With their previous storage environment, SupplyScape would have been forced to overallocate their storage by 300% more than with 3PAR Utility Storage. The savings that SupplyScape has achieved with 3PAR Thin Provisioning has allowed them to control their storage costs by eliminating up-front storage capacity purchases. SupplyScape uses 3PAR Dynamic Optimization for autonomic load balancing that redistributes system resources to extend wide striping and ensure superior, consistent performance when scaling their systems. They also chose 3PAR Virtual Copy to create space-efficient, point-in-time copies.

“SupplyScape’s cloud computing service delivery infrastructure really showcases why 3PAR Utility Storage has gained such wide adoption with SaaS and cloud computing providers,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “SaaS and cloud computing are all about scalability, agility, and reliability and there is no storage platform today that has exceeded 3PAR in these regards. With the most stable blend of innovative features available today, the highly virtualized InServ platform has been shown to deliver tangible cost savings while allowing providers to achieve simple, affordable disaster recovery and reliable service delivery.”