3PAR Ships New-Gen Thin-Provisioning Storageware

Utility storage provider 3PAR, one of the few companies not talking much about the glories of deduplication, introduced a new generation of its thin-provisioning storage software Oct. 12 that it says can reduce the upfront cost of a storage technology refresh of legacy systems by as much as 60 percent.

The company made the announcement at the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix.

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3PAR announced four new software products: Thin Conversion, Thin Persistence, Thin Copy Reclamation and Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation. All work exclusively with the company's InServ Storage Server, use its Thin Built In ASIC and are powered by a new virtualization mapping engine for space reclamation called Thin Engine, 3PAR Marketing Director Craig Nunes told eWEEK.

"All of our thin-provisioning software is designed to boost capacity utilization, increase data center efficiency and support green IT initiatives," Nunes said. "The new products are aimed at converting 'fat' legacy volumes to more efficient 'thin' volumes on InServ arrays and work to keep thin volumes and thin copies thin over time."

Thin provisioning is a method of storage resource management and virtualization that lets IT administrators limit the allocation of actual physical storage to what applications immediately need. It enables the automatic addition of capacity on demand up to preset limits so that IT departments can avoid buying and managing excessive amounts of disk storage.

"3PAR's whole architecture is built around its ASIC, which is optimized for TP [thin provisioning] and consequently allows them to do TP more efficiently and faster than you could do with a software bolt on," storage analyst Dave Vellante of Wikibon told eWEEK. "So the thin conversion and thin copy reclamation, etc., is all about doing things more efficiently and squeezing even more waste out of storage—faster with less disruption."

The Veritas integration is "nice and opens more markets," Vellante said.

"Companies like 3PAR and Compellent (and now IBM's XIV) are creating a nice market in block-based storage that is good enough for the data center but way simpler than [EMC's] Symmetrix and other traditional Tier 2 storage," Vellante said. "I think it's here to stay, whereas dedupe, with the Data Domain acquisition, will increasingly be buried into backup."

The four new software offerings are available now, Nunes said.