3PAR Aims for Midsection

3PAR, which has carved a niche selling high-end enterprise SANs to storage-hungry online companies, is moving into the midrange. (See Top Ten Private Companies: Spring 2006.)

3PAR today launched the InServ E200, a dual-controller midrange version of 3PARs enterprise S400 and S800 systems. The E200 supports from 16 to 128 drives and from 2 Tbytes to 63 Tbytes with either Fibre Channel or lower-cost Fibre-attached ATA (FATA) drives. The new system is substantially smaller than the vendor's existing S400, which scales to four nodes and 1,280 drives, or the S800, which supports eight nodes and 2,560 drives.

But the E200 uses the same operating system as the S400 and S800, and it includes identical features such as thin provisioning for configuring capacity, virtual copy and remote copy for replication, and dynamic optimization for converting data volumes from one service level to another. It also supports the iSCSI capability 3PAR recently added to its enterprise boxes. (See 3PAR Joins IP SAN Party.) The E200 supports up to four iSCSI ports.

Pricing for an E200 Storage Server with 2.3 Tbytes of capacity and four Fibre Channel ports starts at around $65,000.

By moving into the midrange, 3PAR enters the fastest growing but most competitive SAN market segment. 3PAR’s previous systems were aimed just below enterprise systems such as EMC Symmetrix, Hitachi Data Systems TagmaStore, and IBM’s DS8000. Scott says 3PAR mostly competes against EMC's CX3-80 -- the highest end of EMC's midrange Clariion platform. Now it will go against EMC’s entire Clariion family as well as other major vendors’ midrange offerings.“Now we’re 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. They’re no longer just elephant hunting,” analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group says. "They’re bringing their technology to new class of customers. That puts them in with more competition, but that’s an expanding market.”

3PAR’s midrange focus is a bit different from that of its chief competitors. 3PAR doesn’t 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 don’t 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.In some instances, it looks like the new midrange systems will be supplemental to larger 3PAR wares. For instance, Scott says one managed service provider plans to use E200s at its customer sites and have several of them replicate back to an S800 box at the provider’s data center.

In another example, Clement Ho, IT manager for semiconductor manufacturer Novellus Systems, runs a Sun StorEdge 9970 built on Hitachi Lightning controllers in his company's main data center, but since Ho's team didn't need another enterprise system in that disaster recovery site, they looked at midrange SANs from EMC, Hitachi, Pillar, and Sun along with 3PAR.

Ho purchased a 3-Tbyte 3PAR E200 to use in his disaster recovery site. He says 3PAR won the deal after his team evaluated demo systems for ease of use, pricing, availability, support, and maintainability.

"3PAR was especially strong in ease of use," Ho says. "My team was looking at different operating system environments, and 3PAR has the easiest operating system. Its rapid provisioning takes 10 seconds to carve out an area for a host. The price is impressive also."

Ho says his major concern about 3PAR is that it is a private company, albeit a well-funded one after a $30 million in April brought its total funding to $183 million. (See 3PAR Picks Up $30M .) "But because we're looking to use it for DR, we don’t place as much weight on that,” Ho says. “This is a standby system. It sits there and waits for a disaster to happen. We're not using it for primary storage."Still, Ho says he will consider 3PAR next time he shops for primary storage. "I won’t rule it out. We'll still use the same five categories to conduct our study."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch