3PAR is leading provider of virtualized storage solutions for both private and public cloud computing needs. As we know storage is the need of every organization and it tends to grow over a period of time. This requires efficient and green storage solutions which not only help in cost cutting for the concerned organizations, but also should be coupled with ease of managing such storage systems. 3PAR offers such facilities to its clients and specializes in various high end technologies including thin provisioning, Nearline SATA drives and so forth.

One of the recent public organizations which benefited from this technology is the Austin Independent School District or AISD. AISD revamped their traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) and has deployed the 3PAR InServ® T400 Storage Server technology in order to shift gears from traditional storage to virtual storage. This not only led to reduction of direct costs in terms of energy savings, but also it would help to save in the long term by doing away with the cost of employing a full time storage administrator which is a necessary requirement for traditional storage systems, due to specialized nature of the task.

Contrary to this, managing the virtual storage provided by 3PAR is quite easy and in the words of the person in charge of network systems and support at AISD – “I could manage it even in my sleep”. This small sentence speaks volumes for the benefits provided by virtual storage solutions in terms of cost efficiency as well as operational ease.

The concept of Thin Provisioning ensures that the organization does not have to waste storage, space and energy because of underutilization of the allocated storage resources. In the virtual storage solution, the intelligent application takes care of such fluctuations in usage and this is certainly a big advantage for a setup like AISD having more than 90 thousand users of its storage space. Hence this rise in storage capacity utilization results in better efficiency of the financial and material resources which are certainly an additional bonus under any circumstances. Earlier AISD had to allocate certain projected amount of space upfront but then it did not get utilized as expected, resulting in wastage of finances, but with the new technology things have changed drastically.

In terms of statistics, AISD has been able to reduce its storage costs by nearly 55% which is a huge figure by any standards, and its power consumption has just risen by nearly one-fourth despite doubling the size of its data center.

As per the management, the results on performance are already showing positive signs and AISD was able to increase performance and cut costs without increasing its head count, which is certainly a beneficial development.

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