AudienceScience Deploying 3par Utility Storage

3PAR announced today AudienceScience has reduced its storage total cost of ownership (TCO) by nearly 50% as a result of deploying 3PAR Utility Storage in its VMware vSphere environment.

By replacing legacy storage with the 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server, AudienceScience reduced the amount of storage capacity required to support server virtualisation by 83%. In addition, AudienceScience anticipates a 44% reduction in storage TCO over the next three years based on several factors, including a 50% reduction in storage footprint and power requirements, a 10X performance increase for block- and file-based applications, and a 78% increase in storage capacity utilisation with 3PAR Utility Storage.
 
“As the leading provider of online audience-targeted advertising, our company continues to experience tremendous growth. As we began developing our plans for supporting significant capacity in the coming months, we looked at the price of maintaining our existing storage over the next three years and determined that, for the same cost, we could purchase the 3PAR T-Class array outright,” said Brandon Mason VP of Technology at AudienceScience. “This combined savings, coupled with technical benefits such as high availability and increased performance, made the move an easy decision.”
 
Since deploying 3PAR, AudienceScience has enjoyed 100% storage uptime. Due to the performance and reliability of the InServ T-Class, AudienceScience has increased virtual machine (VM) density per physical server, retired racks of existing servers used for testing, and collapsed physical servers used for vSphere onto a single blade enclosure for significant space and power savings. The market researcher even has the headroom to double the raw storage capacity of its 3PAR array without increasing its datacentre floor space footprint.
 
With 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, AudienceScience has dramatically reduced storage capacity requirements, since physical capacity is now allocated on an as-needed basis and is only consumed when vSphere writes to a thin provisioned storage volume. 3PAR Thin Provisioning has not only enabled AudienceScience to eliminate wasted space when presenting storage to ESX hosts, but net usable space has more than doubled as utilisation has gone from 50% with legacy storage to 89% with 3PAR.
 
3PAR Dynamic Optimisation, combined with 3PAR Thin Provisioning, has yielded a 78% increase in storage capacity utilisation for AudienceScience. By using Dynamic Optimisation to dynamically and nondisruptively convert Fast RAID 5 (3+1) volumes to Fast RAID 5 (5+1) volumes, AudienceScience saved 22% on capacity alone. By implementing file services using the 3PAR array for backend storage, AudienceScience’s storage environment—which uses only cost-efficient SATA drives—now supports both block- and file-based storage and delivers better performance to applications than its previous environment.
 
“AudienceScience empowers marketers with the intelligence and control to execute effective global campaigns,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “Accessing 200 billion data insights into 386 million people worldwide, data storage is absolutely integral to AudienceScience’s business. By helping to control datacentre costs and increase ROI—particularly with VMware vSphere—3PAR has enabled AudienceScience to become more agile and efficient.”