Press Releases

Priceline.com Books Travel With 3PAR Utility Storage

Leading Online Travel Firm Serves Customers Reliably while Reducing Storage Administration 50% and Doubling Capacity Utilization

FREMONT, CA, US — August 9, 2005

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that priceline.com® Inc., a leading online travel company, has purchased and deployed multiple 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers to consolidate and protect all mission critical and SAN-resident data, including core demand collection and offer processing Oracle databases. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based firm selected 3PAR Utility Storage over other vendors for the availability, ease-of-use, performance and cost-effectiveness inherent in the 3PAR array.

"3PAR Utility Storage is the most cost-effective storage we've found to meet our critical performance and 99.999% availability objectives," said Ron Rose, Chief Information Officer at priceline.com. "By consolidating on 3PAR, we've reduced our storage administration by more than 50% and doubled our capacity utilization."

Replacing priceline.com's previous modular storage environment across multiple locations with 3PAR Utility Storage has resulted in other significant gains, including a reduction in power and floor space requirements in excess of 60%. The high scalability and port density of 3PAR InServ Storage Servers has also allowed priceline.com to extend its significant switching investment by cutting port usage more than 50% in its SAN infrastructure which supports dozens of servers. Lastly, the embedded volume management capabilities of the 3PAR InForm® Operating System-which delivers precise, application-tailored data service levels-have permitted priceline.com to avoid host-based volume management license, support and administrative costs.

"The value that 3PAR Utility Storage brings to customers is quantifiable and very obvious. Priceline.com is another example of 3PAR customers that are significantly reducing capital cost and eliminating many of the cumbersome and time consuming tasks of managing storage," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "3PAR has reached the next level in its growth with customer proven solutions that are supporting mission-critical environments with the highest performance and reliability requirements."

"Many of our customers, like priceline.com, are looking to deploy mission-critical utility computing infrastructures to achieve more with less, on demand," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "3PAR Utility Storage is often the first step they take in building an infrastructure that reduces complexity, improves utilization and delivers the flexibility and responsiveness promised by utility computing."

Each 3PAR system offers non-disruptive, massive and fine-grained scalability of capacity, performance and connectivity. Each system also delivers automatic volume management and configuration as well as massive and automatic load balancing across all system resources-dramatically reducing storage administration and eliminating the need to over-provision purchased resources.

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.