ExactTarget Picks 3PAR

FREMONT, Calif. -- 3PAR(R) (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that ExactTarget, the leading provider of on-demand, email and one-to-one marketing solutions, has made a significant investment in utility storage, purchasing multiple 3PAR InServ(R) Storage Servers to support its mission-critical Microsoft(R) SQL-based application services. For its permission-based, custom email delivery and tracking services, ExactTarget also chose 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization based on their combined ability to improve capacity utilization over the data lifecycle.

"We originally chose 3PAR for its industry-leading thin, non-disruptive Data Lifecycle Management and, as a result of the platform's simplicity of operations, we've already demonstrated a 75% reduction in storage administration effort," said Jim Saricos, Director of Data and Performance Management for ExactTarget. "In addition, we believe that our decision to invest in the 3PAR platform will cut our capacity and array purchase requirements by at least 50% as compared to other systems," said Saricos.

Traditional Storage: No Match for Growing Business Demands

Thousands of organizations worldwide, including The Home Depot, Papa John's, Cold Stone Creamery and Careerbuilder.com, rely on the ExactTarget platform for their integrated email marketing needs. With nearly a billion outgoing emails each month, ExactTarget required a high performance, cost-effective storage environment that could keep pace, and deliver tiered storage to control the company's increasing quantity of data. With a growing customer base, the new environment would also need to address both demanding IOPS and latency requirements.

Innovative, Autonomic Approach to Storage Provisioning and OptimizationAfter considering storage platforms and conducting a rigorous performance evaluation, ExactTarget chose highly virtualized, clustered and modular 3PAR Utility Storage. ExactTarget found that 3PAR uniquely delivered two to four times the performance of similarly configured systems being considered from traditional vendors. The 3PAR InServ achieved these performance results with the use of cost-effective 10K drives, without requiring manual load balancing across storage controllers or disks, and without any RAID group planning or configuration effort.

"3PAR uses the term 'autonomic' to describe their provisioning and system optimization processes," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "It is important to understand the value of this since its InServ storage system provides a number of sophisticated technologies and an intelligent underlying architecture that automates many of the mundane and often complex tasks required by other storage systems in this class. The bottom-line is that it changes the experience of storage and data management making it far more efficient and perpetually optimized."

3PAR Inc.