Cbeyond Maximizes Storage Efficiency With 3PAR Thin Provisioning

Cbeyond Maximizes Storage Efficiency With 3PAR Thin Provisioning Fast-Growing VoIP Telecom Provider Does More With Less FREMONT, Calif., Jan. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- 3PAR(R), the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Cbeyond Communications, a provider of integrated voice, data and internet services, has purchased two 3PAR InServ(R) Storage Servers for its mission-critical operational support systems and its test and development environment. The Atlanta-based firm, which serves over 15,000 businesses in major metropolitan areas, selected 3PAR over other storage vendors based on performance, scalability, simplicity and unmatched cost effectiveness. "We have achieved substantial savings with 3PAR's Thin Provisioning," said Allen Thomas, Senior Director of System Operations at Cbeyond. "3PAR Thin Provisioning allowed us to permanently eliminate the waste associated with unused allocated capacity and has dramatically simplified storage provisioning. Since 3PAR, I can't think of the last time we worried about storage." Cbeyond is a voice and broadband Internet provider built exclusively to serve small businesses (4 to 200 employees) using Voice over Internet Protocol technology. Cbeyond serves customers in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Houston and Chicago and delivers an integrated product that offers high-speed T-1 Internet access, local and long distance voice services, web hosting, email, conference calling and VPN. Cbeyond's prior storage environment consisted of assorted embedded disk, direct attached storage (DAS), and filers from a variety of major vendors. This older environment yielded lower performance, unusable islands of storage capacity and overall architectural inflexibility. In the past, Cbeyond's IT staff addressed these inefficiencies manually through a progressively intensive administrative effort, which took time from value-add activities. The old storage environment also made it more difficult to maintain identical test and production systems, slowing the introduction of new applications and features. The performance of its prior filer-based database created unnecessary administrative burdens for the completion of bi-monthly billing processes. To ease this burden, Cbeyond set out to find a storage solution that would improve performance and scalability. Cbeyond also had an essential financial requirement to create a pay-as-you grow utility infrastructure to eliminate over-provisioning. After evaluating storage solutions from larger vendors, Cbeyond ultimately selected two 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers with 9 terabytes of capacity each -- one for production network support systems and the other for test and development. For its many applications that utilize 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Cbeyond was able to purchase half the capacity required by competing vendors' solutions. 3PAR Thin Provisioning lets users provision application storage once and purchase raw capacity only for written data. In addition, Cbeyond estimates it has avoided the investment of two full time storage administrators by selecting the easy-to-manage 3PAR InServ with Thin Provisioning. By leveraging the InServ Storage Server's abundant native connectivity and volume management capabilities, Cbeyond has also eliminated the additional cost and complexity of SAN switching and host volume management associated with fifty Linux and Solaris hosts. Cbeyond was also able to improve the performance over its prior systems and purchase fewer storage arrays by taking advantage of 3PAR's unique asymmetrical virtualization technology, which simultaneously provides high performance for both transaction and throughput-intensive workloads. On a single InServ Storage Server, Cbeyond consolidated multiple diverse workloads, including transaction-intensive Oracle applications, throughput-intensive billing processes, ad hoc reporting and snapshot-based backup. "The mixed workload support is like having a dedicated storage array for each application," commented Thomas. Additionally, Cbeyond chose 3PAR Virtual Copy for flexible and efficient array-based snapshots. With 3PAR Virtual Copy, Cbeyond has increased Oracle availability by taking hourly and non-disruptive snapshots of their Oracle database, and by affordably retaining them for one week to enable rapid recovery from multiple points in time. Virtual Copy has also allowed Cbeyond to perform non-disruptive, off-host backups of Oracle on a daily basis. "3PAR Utility Storage lets companies like Cbeyond substantially cut their total cost of data," said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "Our customers are able to free up human resources, purchase far less capacity and eliminate devices and layers from their SAN. With this deployment, Cbeyond has joined a rapidly growing group of satisfied Utility Storage customers enjoying significant cost savings." About 3PAR 3PAR is the leading provider of Utility Storage, a category of enterprise storage arrays that offers a highly scalable, efficient and controllable information infrastructure. 3PAR's tightly tuned system of software, hardware and mission-critical service allows customers to securely consolidate storage, centralize information and reduce total cost of ownership -- simply. Well positioned with key strategic investors including Oracle, Sun, and VERITAS, 3PAR has been operating successfully for the past five years and has been serving enterprise customers since 2002. 3PAR is based in Fremont, California, and has offices in London, UK and Tokyo, Japan. The company's corporate headquarters are located at 4209 Technology Drive, Fremont, CA 94538. Phone: 510-413-5999, fax: 510-354-3070, email: salesinfo@3pardata.com, Web site: http://www.3par.com/ . About Cbeyond Communications Cbeyond Communications is a privately held, Atlanta-based managed services provider in the emerging local voice and broadband services market using a 100% Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) local phone network. Using VoIP and a 100% Cisco network, Cbeyond delivers to small business customers in Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Houston and Chicago an integrated package of high quality local and long distance telephony services, high-speed Internet access and Internet-based applications. For more information on Cbeyond Communications, visit www.cbeyond.net. NOTE: 3PARdata, the 3PAR logo, 3PAR, Serving Information, InServ, InForm, and InSpire are all trademarks or registered trademarks of 3PARdata, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Source: 3PARdata, Inc. CONTACT: Julie Greene, Sr. Marcom Manager of 3PARdata, +1-510-668-9262, or jgreene@3pardata.com Web site: http://www.cbeyond.net/ Web site: http://www.3par.com/ ------- Profile: International Entertainment