That 3PAR entered its 2nd decade in 2009, should not distract from the fact that the company is firmly mature. And youthful yet mature organisations wants to discuss the big issues of the day. In the Summer of 2010 the company is making great strides to promote the concepts of utility based computing and IT-as-a-service.

Company Background

3PAR’s annual revenues grew 57% to $194M from 2009 to 2010 with a net loss of $3M.

A few ratios from the 3PAR 2009 financials that gives an indication of where it is heading:

  • Product vs. Support revenue is 86:14 with the Support portion growing
  • US vs. International revenue is 80:20 with International growing
  • Direct vs. Indirect revenue is 66:34 with Indirect growing

The company has clearly grown during the recession, with WW staff numbers growing to 650, up by 200 from 2 years ago in 2008.

Tech

From initially selling itself on thin-provisioned capacity the company now calls itself a provider of utility storage systems. And this is a fair description given the rich set of features that its portfolio embraces.

Unique to the 3PAR Storage Servers:

  • InSpire storage architecture for its InServ storage systems
  • 3PAR Gen3 ASIC in each InServ Controller Node
  • 3PAR InForm Operating System (spanning the following features/functions: 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR Thin Conversion, 3PAR Thin Persistence, 3PAR Virtual Copy, 3PAR Remote Copy, 3PAR Adaptive Optimization, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR Virtual Domains, 3PAR Virtual Lock, 3PAR System Tuner)

The 3PAR storage systems are based on 3PAR’s own ASICs powering its own controllers based on 2 or more InServ cluster nodes depending on performance requirements. The InForm Operating System provides the platform on the 3PAR storage systems for its varied functions.

Comment

With its existing rich feature set, 3PAR could purely be concentrating on sales by ensuring that existing and prospective customers use as many features as possible. Nevertheless, the company is banging the grander drums of utility computing and IT-as-a-service. We believe this is justified rather than marketing hype.

Virtualization – storage

IT needs clever optimised storage and virtualization is a key enabler. The realm of storage was targeted with the first wave of virtualization in the early 90s as multivendor solutions began to flourish. The result was a race by all vendors to virtualize anything inside their proprietary arrays. These days we are actually experiencing the second wave of storage virtualization, and this is all for the good.

Virtualization – servers

It could be said that X86 virtualization appear to be getting all the current virtualization attention, and indeed that X86 was late to the game. Other platforms such as IBM’s System 370 were early pioneers of virtualizing all server components. However by now, the world of X86 will never want to return to its pre-virtualized days.

Virtualization – storage & servers

The synergies of managing virtualised environments come from the virtualisation software being able to communicate intelligently with its storage. Indeed, 3PAR has been a frontrunner in developing its code that supports VMware and Hyper-V. This provides the happy foundation for virtual machines and their volumes and images.

Utility computing and IT-as-a-service

One reason why 3PAR is leading with utility computing messages is because the company has made significant in-roads with the XSP customer segment. This category of customers want an infrastructure that is highly scalable, simple to deploy, optimised for server virtualisation and of course cost efficient. And these types of organisations are invariably the leading proponents for multi-tenanted, virtualized infrastructures.

Regardless of whether customers today are planning to embark on cloud-based architectures in the near future, it is difficult not to recommend beginning to explore their merits.

3PAR has committed its strategy to openly discussing the benefits of IT-as-a-service and the aspects that will come to define best of breed IT. And even if this is a 30 year roadmap, as 3PAR itself states, customers need to focus on the industry players who intend to bring substance to this debate.