3PAR Answers Call From Netia

3PAR announced that Netia SA, Poland’s largest alternative provider of fixed-line telecommunications services, has consolidated their legacy storage infrastructure onto 3PAR Utility Storage to cut costs, eliminate performance bottlenecks, increase availability, speed provisioning of new services, and reduce administration time.

With 3PAR, Netia’s datacenter supports over a million voice service customers and nearly half a million broadband subscribers with 40% less capacity than required with traditional storage arrays. Netia’s new 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure has reduced storage administration time by 90% as compared to the telecom provider’s previous environment and has enhanced its business agility by reducing the average time to provision new volumes from several hours to just minutes.

"We understood that 3PAR technology was extremely innovative, and that there was no other technology like it on the market," said Marek Wolynko, Storage Expert at Netia. "But having only ever dealt with traditional storage vendors, we were unsure about reliability and support. At the time, choosing 3PAR seemed risky for us. These concerns turned out to be completely unfounded, as 3PAR has delivered us with five-nines availability and fast, effective support — and for almost half the cost of traditional storage."

In September 2008, Netia completed the acquisition of Tele2 Polska Sp. z o. o., making the telecom provider the indisputable leader among alternative telecoms operating on the Polish market. This acquisition, coupled with an already-growing customer base for both broadband and voice subscribers, led to an increased service demand that was taxing Netia’s IT infrastructure and had led to a queue of applications waiting for disk space.

Through 3PAR Channel Partner POLCOM, Netia purchased a 50-Terabyte 3PAR InServ Storage Server to replace their legacy storage infrastructure, which had become expensive to maintain and upgrade. Consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage proved to be a fast, easy, and extremely affordable way for Netia to address the needs of their growing subscriber base while also lowering IT costs by cutting capacity purchases and energy costs nearly in half.

With 3PAR, Netia has been able to achieve and maintain five-nines availability, eliminate performance bottlenecks in their storage environment, double their disk space utilization rates, and increase administrative efficiency by 10x. Performance issues related to I/O subsystems have disappeared and performance on Netia’s warehouse system has quadrupled that of their previous storage system.

The 40% capacity savings that Netia has experienced with 3PAR Thin Provisioning and thin-aware 3PAR Virtual Copy has not only saved the telecom provider on disk purchases, but has led to lower power consumption. Additionally, with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, Netia has been able to assure both high utilization rates and high service levels through non-disruptively altering volume parameters using a single command.

"After completing a cost-benefit analysis, the decision to move to 3PAR was easy," said Tomasz Kowalski, Sales Director, Telco Sector, POLCOM. "Netia made the right choice. 3PAR Utility Storage has delivered benefits that go well beyond just cost savings."

"3PAR has become the storage standard for the Polish telecom industry, counting more than 90% of Polish telecoms among our customers," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "That places Netia in good company among the other telecoms that have turned to 3PAR for innovative features and lower total cost of data – things that legacy storage simply cannot offer. For Netia, like our other Polish telecom customers, this strategy has paid off big not just in terms of cost savings, but also increased availability, increased performance, reduced administration time, and lower energy consumption."