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Press Releases
3PAR Speeds Drug Discovery for Infinity Pharmaceuticals With Utility Storage
Best-in-Class Array Selected for Mission Critical Agility and Efficiency
FREMONT, CA, US — July 15, 2003
3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a leading drug discovery company, has purchased and installed a 3PAR InServ® Storage Server. A pioneer in the rapid discovery of new drug treatments through chemical genetics, Infinity chose 3PAR to underpin a dynamic, information-centric infrastructure for the entire company. 3PAR's distinctive ease-of-use, seamless scalability, and unique multi-tenant characteristics were critical to Infinity's advanced IT infrastructure — a targeted competitive advantage in Infinity's business strategy. The system was purchased through 3PAR's solution delivery partner, Corporate Technologies, Inc., which is headquartered in Burlington, Mass.
Utility Storage Expands and Accelerates Drug Discovery
Typically, drug discovery is a prolonged and serial path. Infinity has side-stepped the traditional process with an innovative approach that marries diverse disciplines such as synthetic chemistry, biological screening, and informatics. The result is the ability to test and introduce lifesaving drugs on an unmatched scale.
Central to this approach is an intense and extensive focus on information management, including advanced data structures, knowledge management, and collaboration capabilities. Uniquely, 3PAR was able to meet Infinity's unpredictable and potentially massive requirements for scalability and performance while avoiding the substantial upfront cost of competing solutions.
"We're delighted with our selection of 3PAR and believe their Utility Storage solution gives us a tremendously flexible, simplified, and powerful storage platform that can match the pace of our business," said Andrew Palmer, Chief Information and Administration Officer for Infinity. "As the CIO, I also could not afford to continually grow headcount within our IT infrastructure. 3PAR has allowed us to manage all of our information assets with negligible overhead."
The InServ Storage Server supports not only Infinity's proprietary business-critical applications, but also its general applications like Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, and Windows file services. 3PAR's unique InSpire® Architecture, with hardware and software fault tolerance, gave Infinity the confidence it needed to centralize its information on a single platform.
"Utility Storage solutions can accelerate business results for users and provide cost effective entry points without sacrificing scalability, and have the potential of capturing significant market share by increasing ROI" added Roger Cox, Research Vice President at the Gartner, Inc.
Evaluating and Selecting 3PAR
As part of the purchase evaluation, Infinity assured themselves about 3PAR local and remote support. "3PAR's support process was tested and worked as advertised...we took a disk drive failure and 3PAR notified us before we knew about it," said Andy Palmer.
Infinity also wanted to understand how they could safely partner with 3PAR as an emerging company. "Infinity became well acquainted with our management team and conservative business model," said David Scott, 3PAR CEO. "Beyond that, Infinity determined that their downside risk was eliminated by the immediate efficiencies and payback of Utility Storage — they couldn't lose."
In addition, Infinity gained confidence through the recommendation of 3PAR by Corporate Technologies, who acted as its technology advisor.
Lastly, the interoperability support between 3PAR and Cisco, Infinity's chosen fabric supplier, allowed Infinity to build a SAN using the solutions from both companies. "The testing and validation work done by Cisco and 3PAR means customers can leverage the combined value of our industry-leading solutions without risk," added Bill Erdman, Director of Technology Alliances in the Storage Technology Group at Cisco.
Infinity selected an InServ S800 model, connected to Cisco MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switches, to replace a principally direct-attached storage environment. Infinity also chose 3PAR Virtual Copy, a highly flexible and efficient snapshot technology for point-in-time copies. Host servers are predominantly Dell servers running Linux and Microsoft Windows.
About Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Boston, Massachusetts, was founded in 2001 by world leaders in chemistry, genomic biology, medicine, software, and business. The company is committed to improving human health by changing drug discovery to bring important new medicines to patients. Infinity's initial drug discovery efforts are focused on cancer, metabolic disorders, infectious disease, and inflammatory disease. For more information, please visit www.ipi.com.
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.
