Thames River Capital With 3par

3PAR, Inc. announced that fund management firm Thames River Capital has cost-effectively increased storage capacity, reduced provisioning time by 98%, and cut storage maintenance costs by 50% as a result of deploying the 3PAR InServ F400 Storage Server. By consolidating its legacy SAN onto 3PAR Utility Storage, Thames River Capital has also experienced increased scalability and improved VMware integration.

"We had run out of space on our SAN and were finding storage management had become a real headache," said Robert Cockerill, IT Infrastructure Manager at Thames River Capital. "I was spending far too much of my time babysitting our storage. With 3PAR, managing our data is so easy that we no longer have to think about it."

Founded in 1998, Thames River Capital is an integrated fund management firm headquartered in London with 168 employees and US $13.3 billion in funds under management, as of March 31, 2010. When the license expired for its existing replication and disaster recovery system, Thames River Capital opted to look for a cost-effective alternative that could provide greater scalability, simpler management, faster backup and replication, and improved integration with VMware server virtualization software. Since the fund manager stands to lose tens of millions of dollars for every minute that its trading applications are offline, it also needed an agile, ‘always-on’ storage environment with superior reliability.

"One of the reasons we chose 3PAR Utility Storage was due to the platform’s performance and ease of use with VMware," said Robert. "The virtualized server and storage combination has delivered above and beyond what was expected. An environment that was once chunky and complex has been transformed into a completely reliable, simple, and efficient datacenter. The results are truly astounding."

After evaluating the incumbent storage vendors, Thames River Capital decided to deploy the 3PAR InServ F400 Storage Server at both its corporate datacenter and its sister datacenter at Nevsky Capital – another fund managed by the firm. Both of these InServ arrays were then configured to back up to a third InServ array housed at SunGard.

3PAR Thin Provisioning software was a huge value-add for Thames River Capital when it came to simplifying storage management and eliminating the need for both up-front provisioning and pre-planning. With Thin Provisioning, provisioning is autonomic and configuring LUNs is so simple that the fund manager has been able to halve storage administration costs, as it no longer needs to hire platform-specific storage specialists to help manage its environment.

"The financial services industry relies heavily on information technology, especially storage," said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. "The results achieved by Thames River Capital demonstrate how 3PAR Utility Storage meets the capacity and uptime requirements of financial traders for whom time is money. This is an important vindication of our strategy of providing cost-effective scalability and ease of use for even the most demanding environments."