Press Releases

Where's The Mail? Grayhair Knows With 3PAR Utility Storage

Mail Tracking Firm Speeds Operations & Cuts Storage Administrative Costs by 100%

Fremont, CA, US - June 9, 2004

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today the purchase and production deployment of the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server by GrayHair Software, Inc., a service provider to leading consumer credit issuers, publishers, and insurers. Through the real-time tracking of inbound and outbound mail across the United States, GrayHair allows customers to cut transaction costs, increase marketing effectiveness, and plan cash flows. By selecting 3PAR Utility Storage to simplify its high-performance, high-growth data infrastructure, GrayHair can now service its clients faster, more reliably, and at reduced cost.

With its database growing eleven gigabytes per day, GrayHair found it increasingly difficult to scale its environment and maintain acceptable performance levels using traditional modular arrays. GrayHair needed a broadly scalable, flexible, and virtualized storage platform—one that could deliver high performance while reducing administrative complexity. 3PAR Utility Storage provided the only viable solution. With 3PAR, GrayHair experienced a ten-fold improvement in database performance. According to GrayHair, its prior HP-based storage environment required "constant manipulation" and consumed 30% of IT's resources. GrayHair now spends "zero time" managing its storage to maintain service levels.

"With 3PAR, it's been set it and forget it,'" said Cameron Bellamy, President and CEO of GrayHair Software. "We no longer have to struggle with our storage in order to run our business, a service that helps our customers save millions of dollars a month."

Pressing Problems

The location of millions of pieces of mail—scanned at thousands of routing points within the US Postal Service—represents critical and time sensitive information to GrayHair customers. For example, before canceling a payment due to a potential loss, and then incurring a costly replacement transaction, a GrayHair customer can determine if and where the original payment may be in the mail system by accessing data obtained through GrayHair's services. To provide this timely information, GrayHair relies on a Microsoft SQL database hosted by an eight-processor Intel-based server. The database is subject to heavy and continuous loading and report generating processes. Before 3PAR Utility Storage was installed, the company experienced slow performance, random errors, and actual system failures. To maintain customer commitments, GrayHair's IT staff had to dedicate extraordinary administrative effort and time.

To resolve this business critical problem, GrayHair set definitive criteria for a new storage solution. These included the ability to simply scale capacity and performance as needed and to reduce administrative effort. In addition to 3PAR, they evaluated modular solutions from major vendors including HP, EMC, and Hitachi Data Systems. No system proved satisfactory after evaluating vendors' claims and in-house testing. Then, guided by independent test results from the Storage Performance Council (SPC-1), GrayHair decided to learn more about 3PAR.

Total Solution

After conducting an in-house evaluation, GrayHair decided on the 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Server with 2 Controller Nodes and 6 terabytes of capacity. GrayHair also purchased the 3PAR InForm® Operating System for simplified virtualization capabilities. The company now achieves high and reliable performance—ten fold better than before. GrayHair can now meet service levels easily and consistently with the lowest possible management burden. Since the 3PAR Utility Storage is intelligently load balanced across all resources, performance and availability is automatic. Provisioning is as simple as requesting a service level. As a result, GrayHair has been able to shift resources to higher-value or previously neglected activities.

Scaling its environment is no longer a concern because GrayHair can tap into the massive, multi-dimensional headroom of the InServ Storage Server to meet growth requirements. GrayHair is also now able to add independent elements of capacity, performance, and connectivity as needed and non-disruptively. The company already plans a three-terabyte upgrade.

"Databases are critical applications for most businesses, and require significant caretaking within traditional IT environments," commented Peter Gerr, Analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group. "As GrayHair's experience illustrates, 3PAR can turn storage from a IT management problem into a value-add service that benefits the entire business."

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE Arca: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.