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3PAR Spins Disk Trick: Page 3 of 4

For 3PAR, which has been shipping its system for less than a year, the feature promises to help it better compete against the Big 3 that dominate the high-end RAID array business: EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). To date, 3PAR has managed to sell a couple of dozen systems, but that's a drop in the bucket for EMC, HDS, or IBM (see 3PAR Hits Up Hitachi and 3PAR Sells 20 Systems).

Scott believes Thin Provisioning will allow 3PAR to offer the same overall system as competing vendors, but at a much lower initial price -- as much as one third or less the upfront cost.

Here's how he figures the math: Say an application is provisioned for 8 TBytes. In a RAID 1 configuration, that becomes 16 TBytes for the base volume. If you add one local copy and one remote copy of the data, that's 48 TBytes in all. At 5 cents per MByte, that much storage would cost $2.4 million.

By contrast, with 3PAR's Thin Provisioning, a customer can start with 2 TBytes of storage capacity, assuming the original 8 TBytes will be only 25 percent utilized. The total storage required is 10 TBytes (the original 2 TBytes; 2 Tbytes for RAID 1; 2 Tbytes for a local copy using 3PAR's copy-on-write feature; and 4 Tbytes for the remote copy), which at 3PAR's pricing of 7.5 cents per MByte would come to $750,000.

So if this is such a fantastic idea, why haven't the likes of EMC or IBM adopted it? Scott says they can't afford to, because it would drastically shrink their existing revenue streams.