3PAR Fills Prescription of LifeScript

3PAR announced that women’s online health portal LifeScript.com has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage for affordable, scalable, and highly intelligent storage as part of an enhanced utility computing environment. With 3PAR, LifeScript’s Web 2.0 portal and email processing engine now supports three billion transactions per month for a third less cost than their previous storage environment. LifeScript’s new infrastructure has also enhanced business agility by reducing average time to provision new servers from several hours to just minutes.

LifeScript delivers health guidance and resources to women over the internet using a cloud computing delivery model. This service delivery is backed by a resilient, agile, and high-performance utility computing infrastructure built on next-gen Utility Storage arrays from 3PAR and server virtualization from VMware.

"When 3PAR came along, we were firmly committed to growing our traditional storage infrastructure in response to increasing storage capacity needs following server virtualization migration onto VMware," said Jack Hogan, Chief Operations Officer for LifeScript. "After further investigation, however, it quickly became obvious that 3PAR offered us both capacity savings and intelligent integration with VMware to curb storage costs and provide greater performance and agility."

As a top-10 commercial health Website and the #1 Website dedicated to women’s health, LifeScript.com attracts approximately four million unique visitors and 30-40 million page views monthly. In addition, the Web 2.0 portal has approximately 10 million subscribers to its six daily email newsletters. LifeScript’s business-to-consumer model relies on email newsletters and a highly focused database to drive traffic to its Website. Accordingly, LifeScript must be able to store a large amount of email history data and have immediate access to that data at all times. Availability and uptime are critical since downtime and degraded performance are detrimental to online business.

"In today’s challenging economic environment, we’re seeing SaaS and Web 2.0 datacenters under pressure to become leaner and meaner, and many are turning to virtualization to achieve this," said Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst & Consultant at Taneja Group. "However, these organizations are often surprised to discover that server virtualization is not a silver bullet. Rolling out VMware on top of an inflexible and inefficient traditional storage infrastructure fails to address deeper inefficiencies — which is why any and every organization deploying server virtualization needs to take a long, hard look at their storage infrastructure."

LifeScript purchased the 3PAR InServ Storage Server with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization for nondisruptive and autonomic system resource balancing and 3PAR Thin Provisioning software for capacity savings. LifeScript was extremely impressed with 3PAR’s ease of installation and ongoing maintenance. LifeScript’s 3PAR system was up and running in a matter of hours and did not require specialized training like their previous storage. With 3PAR, time to deployment for new storage has increased four-fold, a benefit that has greatly enhanced LifeScript’s business agility.

"With 3PAR, we can grow reliably, affordably, and more easily than previously possible — without risking performance levels or reliability — even during peak usage periods," said Hogan.

"The Web 2.0 portal takes full advantage of the native tiered-storage capabilities of the 3PAR array, using economical Nearline drives for development and user acceptance testing while using Fibre Channel drives for production Web servers," said Gary Rizo, Director of IT Operations for LifeScript. LifeScript’s enterprise email infrastructure also utilizes 3PAR’s Thin Provisioning software, which allows the IT department to safely allocate upfront as much logical capacity as is conceivably needed over the application’s lifetime.

In addition, the online portal uses 3PAR Fast RAID 5, a unique capability proven to deliver high levels of performance with less storage capacity. The abundant memory bandwidth and built-in RAID 5 XOR engine within each InServ Controller Node allows Fast RAID 5 to deliver performance levels comparable to RAID 1 but with one third to two thirds less data protection overhead.

"LifeScript’s utility computing infrastructure really showcases the cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and automation of 3PAR Utility Storage and its benefits for virtual server environments," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "Not only does 3PAR enable datacenters to reliably deliver services via the cloud using less storage capacity, but our Utility Storage platform is incredibly responsive to growth."