Ultraspeed Reduces Storage Needs With 3par

3PAR, Inc. announced that top-ten UK hosting provider Ultraspeed UK Limited has consolidated onto the 3PAR InServ F-Class Storage Server as part of a cloud computing datacenter transformation to support the underlying storage requirement for their next-generation Diskless Infrastructure.

With 3PAR Utility Storage, Ultraspeed has cut their storage capacity, administration, and power requirements in half and saved on support costs associated with the new infrastructure to support their Diskless Platform. By consolidating onto a single 3PAR InServ Storage Server, Ultraspeed has not only increased the flexibility and scalability of their storage environment, but has gained the ability to purchase capacity only as they need it in order to reduce up-front costs, leverage falling disk prices, and minimize operating expenses associated with powering, cooling, housing, and administering disks.

Ultraspeed is renowned for their highly virtualized Diskless Infrastructure, which is built on their Diskless Platform. The Diskless Platform is a compilation of best-of-breed architectures which provides end users with the ability to deploy and manage their diskless storage in real time, without the limitations experienced with physical hard disk drives. Ultraspeed’s previous storage environment supported the first generation of the provider’s Diskless Platform, but was hitting major limitations in terms of storage capacity and this was affecting Ultraspeed’s ability to serve end users.

Ultraspeed chose 3PAR to replace and augment existing storage capacity to transition to the next generation of its highly virtualized Diskless service offering. Prior to deploying 3PAR, Ultraspeed was struggling with poor storage utilization and the environmental and financial costs associated with that root inefficiency. Due to low utilization rates within their Network Attached Storage (NAS) environment, allocated but unused capacity was wasting money, energy, and floor space. In addition, with Ultraspeed’s previous environment, the hosting provider had to spend thousands of pounds sterling each time they needed to add physical capacity. They realized that moving to a highly virtualized datacenter with a storage solution capable of scaling in granular increments would help address these problems.

"With 3PAR we have a superior technology which has improved our Diskless service offerings to our customers," said Michael Shanks, Technical Director at Ultraspeed. "We no longer have to worry about hitting our capacity limitations. The biggest surprise for us, however, has been the ease of use associated with the F-Class array. We initially did not believe it could be so simple and kept expecting a ‘gotcha.’ The command line interface, however, is one of the best we have seen and with it we have noticed a significant reduction in the amount of time we expend on managing the system. It now only takes us half the time to provision a LUN as compared to our legacy storage environment."

With 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, Ultraspeed has more than doubled capacity utilization and has cut overall capacity and power requirements in half. This not only represents a significant cost savings, but supports Ultraspeed’s environmental goals. When Ultraspeed does need to add physical storage to their InServ array, they are no longer burdened with the high costs associated with adding new physical capacity. Not only has Ultraspeed seen a cost-related improvement when adding new storage, but they have also gained the ability to add capacity non-disruptively and without impacting customer performance – a dramatic improvement over their previous infrastructure.

"One of the goals of virtualizing our storage environment was deploying a thin provisioning technology that would allow us to pass the cost savings on to our customers," said Shanks. "As anticipated, 3PAR Utility Storage has helped us maximize our cost-efficiency so we could do just this. However, the efficiency of our 3PAR array extends far beyond capital cost savings and includes operational benefits such as slashing power requirements and reducing Diskless backup times from ninety to just five minutes."

"Due to the scale of their infrastructures, service providers in particular are growing more and more concerned with datacenter power consumption – both from a cost perspective and in terms of operational and environmental impact," said Keith Humphreys, Managing Consultant at EuroLAN. "3PAR’s approach – which increases capacity utilization and reduces overall capacity requirements – has proven to be an extremely effective strategy for minimizing not only the monetary costs of data storage, but also the financial and environmental burden associated with housing and cooling that storage."

"Ultraspeed was faced with a choice: either continue along with the status quo or make a strategic shift to accelerate its business," said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. "Like so many of our other customers, Ultraspeed evaluated the cost savings and performance benefits and chose 3PAR not only for the immediate savings we offer, but also for the long-term payoffs of using our highly virtualized arrays as an essential building block for creating a more agile and efficient cloud computing datacenter."