Bateman Engineering First Customer of 3par in South Africa

3PAR, Inc. announced that Bateman Engineering, a technologically-driven engineering project house, has become the first 3PAR Utility Storage customer in South Africa after consolidating onto the 3PAR InServ Storage Server to increase datacenter reliability, address application performance issues, and ensure headroom for future data expansion. By consolidating onto 3PAR, Bateman has significantly reduced its previous storage capacity requirements and administration time.

"We were running out of disk capacity and started looking for a storage array with a proven track record – one which offered innovative features and technologies," said Sharron Midgley, Bateman IT Manager. "But of course we were also looking for a cost-efficient answer and one that would not only be simple to deploy, but which would integrate easily into our current environment. 3PAR was the vendor that met all of these requirements – and more."

The InServ array installed at Bateman – purchased through 3PAR Channel Partner SYSDBA – is highly scalable, so it not only meets the engineering project house’s current capacity needs, but also offers massive headroom for growth. In addition, according to Stavros Karamitsos, Project Leader and Senior Network Engineer at Bateman, with 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, Bateman has reduced storage capacity requirements through increased capacity utilization. This improved efficiency has cut the rate at which Bateman consumes storage capacity in half.

"With 3PAR Thin Provisioning we consume storage capacity only as we require it for written data," said Marius Jordaan, Senior Systems Engineer at Bateman. "This incredible efficiency-boosting mechanism allows us to purchase only what we actually need, only as we actually need it. No more wasted capacity and no more extra disks to house, power, cool, and manage."

According to Senior Systems Engineer Shane Solomon, consolidating onto 3PAR has also enabled Bateman to simplify and streamline storage administration by eliminating multiple storage devices that previously made managing data and disks more complex than necessary. By collapsing all of these devices and their data onto a single 3PAR array – which is administered through a single, unified management console – administration time has been reduced and backups have become simpler and quicker.

In addition to approaching maximum disk capacity, Bateman’s previous environment suffered constant productivity loss due to outages caused by component and disk failures. Data corruption was also a major issue. With 3PAR, these issues have disappeared. Downtime concerns have also been eliminated, thanks to high availability features such as 3PAR Persistent Cache and the array’s clustered, Mesh-Active controller node architecture and full hardware redundancy. The InServ’s fully fault-tolerant architecture is also extremely scalable, so Bateman no longer needs to take storage offline in order to add capacity, which was the case with their previous storage. In addition, proactive monitoring features built into the 3PAR array have given Bateman the ability to respond to potential problems before they occur.

"The economic downturn has resulted in increased demand for 3PAR’s highly virtualized, cost- and energy-efficient storage arrays," said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. "Over the past two years, 3PAR has expanded both geographically and vertically throughout EMEA. The addition of Bateman Engineering as our first 3PAR Utility Storage customer in South Africa is a key milestone along this expansion path."