3Par (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that the 3PAR InServ T-Class storage server with Thin Built In received the 2008 Product of the Year award in the category of Storage/Disk Storage from China Computerworld Magazine.
Each year, China Computerworld Labs (CCW Labs) selects the best products of the year in a range of categories to receive this prestigious award.
The selection criteria include innovation of technology, influence on technology development, market adoption and momentum within China, and vendor commitment to strategic, long-term growth within China.
Thin Built In design
The 3Par Gen3 ASICs within the T-Class arrays feature a Thin Built In design to increase capacity utilisation while maintaining high service levels. This design incorporates detection of allocated but unused capacity (“zero-detection” capability) into the 3Par Gen3 ASIC.
By offering a silicon-based mechanism for fat-to-thin volume conversions, Gen3 ASICs boost capacity utilisation through removing allocated but unused space from traditional storage volumes. 3Par is the first in the industry to commercially ship storage systems with this fat-to-thin capability designed into the hardware architecture of its arrays.
In addition to Thin Built In, the InServ T-Class has the following features and capabilities:
* Enhanced performance. The T-Class is the fastest array available today, boasting the only single-system storage architecture to achieve 224 989.65 IOPS in a published SPC-1 benchmark - a result achieved with 83% written capacity utilisation 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 two controllers and 16 disk drives to eight 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 1.6GB per second data path between the 3Par Gen3 ASIC in each of the system's clustered controller nodes for a total of 45GB per second. This tightly-coupled, clustered architecture enables data and metadata processing to be parallelised and distributed so 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 cost 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 50% less Raid capacity overhead.
"The Product of the Year award from China Computerworld is a significant milestone for 3Par and recognises not only the value of the 3Par Utility Storage platform, but also our commitment to helping customers in China reduce costs and improve their green footprint,” said David Scott, 3Par President and CEO. “3PAR Utility Storage has reduced the cost of storage for customers by 50% and is ideally suited for green data centre deployments and server consolidation projects with VMware. This is why leading enterprises and cloud service providers in China and the world over have chosen 3Par to give them a competitive edge in growing their utility computing and utility storage environments.”
3Par utility storage is available in South Africa via SYSDBA. Further information on the 3Par product is available at http://www.sysdba.com or info@sysdba.com, if you require more in-depth details around what benefits 3Par can bring to your organisation.
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