Now were scaling right into the heart of the midrange, so we will fully expect to compete against NetApp and the HP EVA as well as the Clariion, says 3PAR CEO Dave Scott.
[3PAR is] no longer focused on big giant boxes. Theyre no longer just elephant hunting, analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group says. "Theyre bringing their technology to new class of customers. That puts them in with more competition, but thats an expanding market.
3PARs midrange focus is a bit different from that of its chief competitors. 3PAR doesnt offer SATA, for example, and has no plans for SAS. Scott says the midrange system will rely on FATA drives as an alternative to SATA for low-cost, high capacity drives. Scott also says 3PAR is in no hurry to offer 4-Gbit/s support, although most of his competitors do.
Our target customers are primarily involved with heavy transaction processing, and they have all the bandwidth they need, he says. If we were in high-performance computing, we would support four-gig. Because of the workload types our customers have, we dont have much demand for it, although our architecture allows us to be upgraded.
3PAR positions the E200 as best for departmental systems and remote data center deployments.