3par Quad-Controller Arrays

3PAR introduced the 3PAR InServ F-Class Storage Servers, built to overcome the technical limitations of traditional midrange arrays, offering features and benefits typically associated with high-end arrays but at a price that targets the midrange. Scaling up to four clustered, Mesh-Active controller nodes, InServ F-Class arrays are designed to eliminate the scalability, efficiency, and management sacrifices typical with midrange arrays. F-Class arrays are ideal for customers who desire an alternative to the tradeoffs imposed by legacy midrange architectures but cannot justify the premium cost of high-end arrays. F-Class arrays are designed to save organizations money in three ways: by allowing them to purchase up to 50% fewer arrays, by eliminating up to 75% of the capacity, power, cooling, and floor space required with traditional storage, and by enabling customers to spend up to 90% less time managing their storage.

 
"In these difficult times companies are placing more demands on their midrange storage systems than ever before. They are expanding their use of server virtualization, disk-based backup/recovery, and business analytics," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems research at IDC. "Solutions like 3PAR’s new F-Class arrays—with their meshed, quad-controller architecture—provide companies with peace-of-mind that they can rely on an efficient and simple midrange storage system that won’t run out of horsepower as their needs grow."
 
Reduce Midrange Array Sprawl by 50%
The InServ F-Class arrays offer the same innovative, cache-coherent, clustered architecture and industry-leading, high-end features as the InServ T-Class—the world’s most powerful virtualized storage array—but in a scaled-down array tailored to the midrange IT budget. The quad-controller hardware design of the F-Class—the first of its kind for midrange Fibre Channel arrays—allows greater consolidation and reduces midrange array sprawl by enabling customers to purchase and deploy up to 50% fewer systems as compared to traditional arrays.
 
The F-Class arrays are the only arrays in the midrange to feature a Mesh-Active controller architecture. Unlike legacy ‘active-active’ midrange controller architectures—where each LUN (or volume) is active on only a single controller—3PAR’s Mesh-Active architecture allows each LUN to be active on every mesh controller in the array, thereby delivering more robust, load-balanced performance and greater headroom, automatically.
 
F-Class arrays also feature the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with Thin Built In in each Controller Node for scalable mixed workload support. Data and metadata are processed independently in different processor/memory subsystems within the controllers, eliminating the large impact that sequential workloads (like data mining or backups) can have on transactional workloads such as databases. Without mixed workload support, legacy midrange arrays must be deployed for either transactional or sequential workloads but not both—a limitation that further encourages legacy array sprawl.
 
Additionally, F-Class arrays from 3PAR support 3PAR Virtual Domains, the first and only storage hypervisor–like technology on the market, which facilitates greater storage consolidation by allowing users to create hundreds of virtual arrays—each with secure management domains for different departments or user groups. Virtual Domains was introduced to drive a new wave of consolidation among users who have resisted moving to a shared array platform primarily due to security concerns.
 
“The advanced features of the 3PAR InServ F400 come without the performance and scalability compromises that we typically associate with midrange storage arrays,” said Gregory Thomas, Vice President of IT at Managed Healthcare Associates. “At a time when we are looking to ‘get more for less’, the F-Class is really a high-end array fit for our midrange array budget.”
 
Built-In Green Storage Technology
Reduces Capacity, Power, Cooling, and Floor Space
Featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with Thin Built In, InServ F-Class arrays are the first midrange arrays to offer hardware-based zero-detection capability to enable wire-speed fat-to-thin volume conversions. The revolutionary 3PAR Gen3 ASIC is the only processor that provides an efficient, silicon-based mechanism for converting legacy ‘fat’ volumes to more efficient “thin” volumes on 3PAR Utility Storage.
 
The F-Class arrays also support advanced green storage features such as 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Fast RAID 5—features that have enabled 3PAR customers to reduce capacity as well as power, cooling, and floor space requirements by up to 75%. For example, 3PAR’s unique, ASIC-assisted Fast RAID 5 is capable of delivering performance within 9% of RAID 1 but with 66% less RAID capacity overhead. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR customers have reported deploying up to 75% less capacity to meet their business needs and experiencing commensurate reductions in storage area network (SAN), power, cooling, and floor space costs as a result.
 
Reduce Storage Administration Time by 90%
Unlike legacy midrange arrays, the F-Class arrays share the same InForm Operating System that also runs on the high end of the InServ product line. With the InForm OS, 3PAR customers have been able to reduce administration time by up to 90% by eliminating tedious manual capacity planning. The InForm OS offers instant, application-tailored provisioning through fine-grained virtualization—intelligently and autonomically managing provisioning to simplify storage administration. In addition, the InForm OS assures high and predictable levels of service for all workload types, even as the InServ array grows or even in the event of a component failure—thanks to the massively parallel and fine-grained striping of data across internal resources. Traditional storage planning, change management, and array-specific professional services are also eliminated.
 
“With distinct architectural advantages, thin hardware capabilities, superior performance, and an affordable price tag, InServ F-Class arrays are purpose-built to meet the demands of virtualized datacenters with shrinking budgets,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Now even mid-sized deployments have the agility to respond quickly to changing business needs while maintaining the resiliency that ‘always-on’ businesses demand.”
 
3PAR InServ F-Class Storage Servers start at $80,000 and are available immediately.