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Press Releases
Thomas Weisel Partners Deploys Disaster Recovery, Ends Monolithic Tyranny With 3PAR Utility Storage
Top Financial Services Firm Ends Monolithic Storage Premiums, Drives Utilization to 100%, Cuts Administration 95%, and Protects Data Simply and Efficiently
FREMONT CA, U.S. — June 13, 2005
3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Thomas Weisel Partners (TWP), a leading merchant bank focused exclusively on the growth sectors of the economy, has adopted the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server to consolidate and protect mission critical Oracle, messaging and file-based data. The San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto-based firm selected 3PAR over other vendors for simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.
"3PAR Utility Storage has been a relief for our organization," said Larry Sikon, Chief Information Officer at Thomas Weisel Partners. "We can now apply 95% fewer resources to storage administration, and we are rid of the high price premiums associated with monolithic arrays."
By consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage, Thomas Weisel Partners also made significant gains in capacity utilization. For applications taking advantage of 3PAR Thin Provisioning with dedicate-on-write technology, utilization of allocated capacity now approaches 100%. Previously in TWP's storage environment, consisting of traditional monolithic and direct attached storage with dedicate-on-allocation technology, utilization of allocated capacity was 30%, just above average according to surveys.
Additionally, the company dramatically cut the cost of implementing and managing its disaster recovery plan, a key requirement for all financial services firms. The simple, native Ethernet-based approach of 3PAR's Remote Copy software meant Thomas Weisel Partners avoided the substantial cost of consulting services and incremental equipment typically associated with array-based mirroring systems.
Meeting its need for a simple, shared storage environment, Thomas Weisel Partners consolidated and connected over a dozen servers to a single InServ Storage Server in each location. This saved the company not only the investment in a redundant, switched SAN environment, but also the resulting training, expense and ongoing management for such an infrastructure. In concert with its storage consolidation project, multiple host applications were moved to Linux. The built-in and precisely-tuneable volume management functionality of the 3PAR InForm Operating System saved the firm the cost and support of separate volume managers in its Linux host servers.
"Highly virtualized and scalable arrays offer significant benefits for financial services and a viable path to the Real Time Infrastructure," said Roger Cox, Vice President of Research with the Gartner Group. "Customers should evaluate the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of these solutions carefully."
After considering modular array alternatives from traditional vendors, Thomas Weisel Partners selected 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers for both its San Francisco and New York locations. Due to the inherent efficiencies of 3PAR Thin Provisioning, the InServ Storage Servers were configured with half the raw capacity required by competing alternatives. Thomas Weisel Partners also selected 3PAR Multipath I/O for Microsoft® Windows® for standards-based, cost effective data availability, foregoing more proprietary and costly multipathing solutions. The company now runs all Oracle, Exchange and file services company-wide on 3PAR Utility Storage, achieving a new level of consolidated storage environment. Data is mirrored approximately 3,000 miles between sites using 3PAR Remote Copy.
"3PAR has successfully served the global financial services community, including many Fortune 500 firms, since 2002." said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "The demands of this industry on data availability and cost-effective IT make 3PAR Utility Storage ideal."
Thomas Weisel Partners is a merchant bank providing investment banking, institutional brokerage, private client services, private equity investing and asset management exclusively focused on the growth sectors of the economy. The firm's distinctive competence is combining deep domain expertise, superior transaction execution capability and senior level attention. Thomas Weisel Partners has approximately 550 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York, Boston and Palo Alto, California.
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.
