3Par Shines at Sunlight

BRACKNELL, U.K. -- 3PAR(R), the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that The Sunlight Service Group Ltd, the UK's leading supplier of textile rental and laundering services, has consolidated all of its mission-critical Microsoft(R) applications, including its new centralised Microsoft Dynamics(TM) AX system, onto 3PARInServ(R) S400 Storage Servers with 3PAR Thin Provisioning. Sunlight chose 3PAR Utility Storage for its unique combination of high availability, massive scalability and superior performance with unmatched simplicity and efficiency.

"In order to consolidate disparate IT systems, improve efficiency and reduce costs, we sought to invest in a resilient and scalable yet cost- effective storage platform to support our new centralised Dynamics(TM) system," said Najeeb Ahmad, Technical Projects & Support Manager at Sunlight. "With 3PAR Utility Storage, we have been able to meet our rigorous service level demands for a centralised data repository while cutting our total cost of ownership for storage by more than 50% over competing storage systems. We have just two IT administrators dedicated to both servers and storage and less than 2% of their time is spent administering the 3PAR system. 3PAR has been of considerable benefit in freeing up valuable resources."

Sunlight, one of the companies of The Davis Service Group Plc, provides services to over 70,000 UK customers across industries such as hospitality and healthcare, as well as to government. Sunlight is the number one supplier of workwear rental in the UK, with over one million people wearing its garments at work every day; hence, optimal logistics scheduling and adherence to service level targets are critical to its business strategy and focus on service delivery.

To maintain its leadership position and increase business responsiveness and efficiency, Sunlight set out to consolidate its silos of information, which at that time were spread across tens of branch sites, and move them to centralised systems that could be deployed to more than 1,000 employees over55 sites across the UK. In implementing this strategic initiative, Sunlight found that it needed a scalable, centralised storage platform and that its previous distributed storage environment -- based on modular arrays -- would not scale in performance or capacity.

Sunlight sought a new storage consolidation platform that would deliver high availability, high scalability, high performance, cost efficiency and ease of use while offering the flexibility for affordable remote data replication for disaster recovery. After evaluating alternatives from traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors, Sunlight selected 3PAR Utility Storage as the ideal system."Today's IT professionals view their growing data volumes as being on a collision course with their ability to provide higher levels of data protection," said Claus Egge, Program Director of IDC's European Storage group. "The design philosophy behind 3PAR's InServ S400 Storage Server utilising 3PAR Thin Provisioning provides capacity intelligently and makes the lives of storage managers easier."

Today, Sunlight relies on their 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers with 3PAR Multipath I/O for Microsoft Windows(R) to provide the shared storage platform for its Microsoft Dynamics(TM) AX system, Microsoft SQL servers, clustered Microsoft Exchange servers, clustered Microsoft Windows Server(R)-based file services and Microsoft SharePoint(R) Services for collaborative content and document management applications.

3PAR Inc.