Press Releases

3PAR Answers Call for Utility Storage at Carphone Warehouse

Booming Retailer and Telecom Services Provider Selects 3PAR as New Strategic Storage Platform for Virtual Data Centre

BRACKNELL, UK, November 21, 2006

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that the Carphone Warehouse, Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services with 700 stores in the UK and 1,300 in continental Europe, has deployed two 3PAR InServ® S400 Storage Servers. Working together with IT consultancy Computacenter Services, the Carphone Warehouse chose 3PAR as the online storage standard for its new virtual data centre to increase utilisation rates, improve performance, simplify storage management and ultimately accelerate the time to market for new applications.

"With 3PAR Utility Storage, we have demonstrated a 50% reduction in storage TCO while significantly increasing overall service levels," said Steven Gall, Enterprise Architect at the Carphone Warehouse. "With 3PAR, we can do so much more than we anticipated."

Over the past three years, the Carphone Warehouse - which employs over 12,000 people - experienced exceptional growth thanks to dramatic increases in its customer base, portfolio additions such as landline phone services provider TalkTalk and acquisitions such as AOL UK. As a result, online storage requirements leapt from a single terabyte to several hundreds and the cost and complexity of traditional storage architectures revealed their true colours: unacceptably low utilisation rates for existing server and storage resources and slow time-to-market for new initiatives.

To address these concerns and meet its objectives, the Carphone Warehouse decided to move to a utility computing environment based on storage virtualisation through 3PAR Utility Storage as well as server virtualisation running on VMWare ESX with cost-effective Linux servers and IBM System p5 servers featuring Advanced Power Virtualisation and Virtual I/O.

"3PAR Utility Storage was the ideal answer to the Carphone Warehouse's need for better efficiency, increased scalability and ease of use," said Terry Walby, Datacentre Solutions Director, at Computacenter Services. "Managing unpredictable growth in demand with adequate and cost-effective levels of server and storage provisioning is a great challenge for many of our customers for whom Computacenter Services is able to offer a range of innovative and flexible utility infrastructure solutions. With 3PAR technology we were able to offer the Carphone Warehouse a unique combination of flexibility, affordability and scalability which not only met their current needs but also provided a platform for growth."

Thanks to 3PAR Utility Storage the Carphone Warehouse's virtual data centre was able to:

Eradicate downtime associated with performing data warehouse Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) procedures in its Informatica/Oracle environment and without the need for additional storage capacity;
Increase utilisation rates via storage consolidation for both Disaster Recovery (DR) and Test and Development onto a single, massively scalable system;
Accelerate deployment of new applications with 3PAR Virtual Copy, built on Thin Copy technology, which eliminates the days required to provide or refresh data test images;
Gained simplified server provisioning and recovery capabilities through highly scalable and efficient 3PAR Virtual Copy software. From a single golden image, Carphone Warehouse is able to create multiple read/write virtual boot images for each of its servers, eliminating the need for internal boot drives and host-based volume management software.
Dramatically reduce the time required to provision storage - from days to just seconds - with 3PAR Rapid Provisioning;
Eliminate the complexity and required expertise to implement and maintain DR thanks to 3PAR's easily-managed, Thin Copy-based, remote mirroring technology called 3PAR Remote Copy.

"It is becoming increasingly important for IT departments to deploy just the right amount of capacity over time and provision capacity according to the exact needs of the business,î said Claus Egge, IDC's European Program Director for storage research. "Solutions such as the 3PAR array family show an engineering commitment to giving such functions high priority."

"I am very pleased to add the Carphone Warehouse to 3PAR's expanding list of European customers. Our steady growth outside North America has been a key factor in the overall success that 3PAR has been enjoying," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "Utility Storage is a proven solution for organisations with data intensive storage needs. Whether from the retail, internet, telecom, or financial markets, companies all need to become more competitive. 3PAR gives them the ability to streamline their storage environment and reduce costs dramatically."

About Computacenter Services
We advise customers on their IT strategy, helping them to design and implement technology from a wide range of leading vendors, and manage their IT infrastructure on their behalf. At every stage we assist them with minimising the cost and maximising the business value of both their capital and operational expenditure. We support over 750,000 users in government, corporate and mid-market organisations, have over 2300 mobile technical staff across the UK, and deliver over 120 separate technology change projects every year.

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.