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Press Releases
Survey Uncovers the Biggest Gamble: Millions of Pounds Spent on 'just-In-Case' Storage Capacity
Independent Survey Commissioned by 3PAR Reveals Users Buy Capacity They Might Not Need
LONDON, UK — June 20, 2005
3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, today unveiled the results of an independent survey of IT directors in 100 companies in the financial, manufacturing, retail, distribution and transport industries in the UK. This survey was carried out in April of this year to further understand current storage capacity buying patterns. The most disconcerting finding that emerged from the study is that over half of all respondents admitted to buying capacity before knowing whether it would definitely be utilised, this figure rising to a massive 72% among the financial services respondents. Potential budget waste also emerged among the retail, distribution and transport sectors, with 62% admitting to routinely purchasing capacity they might not need. Other commercial markets were still above the one-in-two mark with 56% of IT directors in the poll admitting to paying for extra capacity that may not be necessary.
This figure also rose with the number of employees in the company; when the head-count was between 1,000 and 3,000 people, half the polled directors revealed buying more storage prior to applications actually requiring it. However, when staff levels rose above 3,000 people, the percentage grew to 64%, or nearly two thirds of IT directors polled saying that they routinely purchased extra capacity that may not be utilised.
While these findings might appear to suggest a somewhat relaxed attitude to storage budgets, in fact they reflect a fundamental problem with traditional approaches to scalability in this part of the network. Until the introduction of Utility Storage, adding capacity required disruption to the business overall, application downtime and substantial cost, hence the tendency to over-allocate in hopes of avoiding potentially greater costs down the road.
However, with the advent of Utility Storage, IT directors no longer have to choose between the risk of making large and unnecessary up-front purchases or that of exposing the organisation to other costs such as service disruption. For example, 3PAR's Thin Provisioning technology enables organisations to allocate any amount of capacity to any application without the need to actually deploy that amount of physical storage at that moment in time. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning, IT administrators can configure an application just once, with whatever amount of virtual storage they wish, and add actual physical capacity as needed, easily and quickly. When additional physical capacity is required, that capacity can be added without service interruption, application downtime, or any negative impact on users. As a result, 3PAR's Utility Storage approach enables organisations to free up large amounts of budget by giving them the opportunity to buy the exact capacity they need, only as it is actually required.
"3PAR has enabled the utility computing wave to embrace storage and our Thin Provisioning approach has already allowed organisations to save millions of pounds on capacity they might never need", said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "Over-allocation of resources does not make financial or technical sense. Yet when it comes to storage capacity, over-allocation has been accepted because, until now, there wasn't a better way. With traditional approaches, when downtime is not an option, over-allocation is the less disruptive solution. Thin Provisioning frees organisations by delivering capacity the way it should be — online and on-demand."
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.
