3PAR (NYSE Arca: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that 3PAR Thin Provisioning has received the 2008 Frost and Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of storage architecture. According to the award announcement from Frost and Sullivan: “3PAR is revolutionising the storage industry and is setting a new benchmark with the advent of 3PAR Thin Provisioning.” Frost and Sullivan's Technology Innovation Award recognises new research that has resulted in innovations that have made a significant contribution to the industry. The award recognises the quality and depth of a company's research and development programme as well as vision and risk-taking.
3PAR Thin Provisioning software is a green technology that has allowed customers to cut disk capacity, energy, and floor space costs by as much as 75%. According to Frost and Sullivan, 3PAR Thin Provisioning helps in providing a high return on IT investment by enabling a greater number of projects at a reduced cost.
With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, capacity is dedicated and configured autonomically and in small, reservationless increments within a massively scalable array-enabling customers to provision storage simply and efficiently. By allowing the one-time, safe over-allocation of physical capacity, 3PAR Thin Provisioning lets organisations provision virtual capacity to applications once and purchase physical capacity only as applications truly require it for written data. 3PAR Thin Provisioning has solved the serious issue of poor capacity utilisation for numerous 3PAR customers - a problem that has lead enterprises to report unacceptably low utilisation rates.
The award given to 3PAR by Frost and Sullivan for 3PAR Thin Provisioning software follows 3PAR's recent announcement of the new 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server, the industry's first storage array with silicon-based “thin” technologies embedded into the array's hardware. The 3PAR Gen3 ASICs inside the T-Class arrays feature a Thin Built In design developed by 3PAR to increase capacity utilisation while maintaining high service levels. This unique hardware architecture offers a silicon-based mechanism to support fat-to-thin volume conversions that promise to boost capacity utilisation by removing allocated but unused space from traditional volumes.
“3PAR has become the de facto standard for thin provisioning and we are honored by the recognition from Frost and Sullivan for developing and driving this transformational technology within our industry,” said Craig Nunes, Vice-President of Marketing for 3PAR. “And although the storage industry is starting to respond with chubby, bolt-on substitutes , real capacity utilisation benefits can only be delivered by a platform that was built from the ground up with thin provisioning in mind.”
In choosing recipients for its Technology Innovation Award, Frost and Sullivan's analyst team tracks innovation in key hi-tech markets. In addition, the process includes primary participant interviews and extensive primary and secondary research via the “bottom-up” approach. The analyst team develops a shortlist of candidates based on a set of qualitative and quantitative measurements. The analysts also consider the pace of the research and technology innovation and the significance or potential relevance of the innovation to the overall industry. The ultimate award recipient is chosen after thorough evaluation of this research.
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