3PAR delivers online grocer with major savings

3PAR, the global provider of utility storage, has announced that FreshDirect has purchased a third 3PAR InServ Storage Server as part of a storage technology refresh. FreshDirect made this decision after its evaluation of both midrange and high-end arrays from the leading monolithic storage vendor revealed that the online grocer stood to save an estimated US$100,000 in annual management costs by staying with 3PAR Utility Storage. In addition, by purchasing the 3PAR InServ, FreshDirect was able to eliminate the purchase of as many as 50 servers and reduce storage capacity requirements nearly in half.

The monolithic storage vendor originally positioned a dual-controller, midrange array against the InServ T400 Storage Server. When the customer determined that the dual-controller technology was not comparable to 3PARs Mesh-Active architecture, the monolithic vendor offered a complimentary high-end array as part of the purchase agreement. However, FreshDirect still chose to stay with 3PAR.

We were considering the purchase of an array from another storage vendor based on the claim that even their entry-level arrays could do more than 3PARs high-end arrays, said Robert Reilly, Director Systems Engineering at FreshDirect. But we quickly found that this just wasnt true. In addition, management tasks we didnt even have to worry about with our InServ required another full-time administrator with the other vendors arrays. As a result, we chose to go with 3PARnot only for the additional capabilities, but for significant cost savings.

Features such as 3PAR Thin Provisioning, which uses disk space only as applications actually require it for written data, have reduced FreshDirects storage hardware needs by 40 percent as compared to traditional storage. By choosing 3PAR, FreshDirect also saved on the cost of server virtualisation. Performance and architectural benefits of the 3PAR InServ platform, such as wide striping and mixed workload support, uniquely enhance virtual machine performance with VMware vSphere, which allowed FreshDirect to increase virtual machine density per physical server. This, in turn, enabled the online grocer to support its growing business while avoiding the purchase of as many as 50 physical serversreducing its physical server footprint by as much as 50%.

We planned to evaluate multiple storage vendors during our refresh cycle, said Reilly. At the end, the team was unanimously in favour of 3PAR, despite the competitions last-minute offer to sweeten the deal with a free monolithic array. We chose to stay with 3PAR after our evaluation showed that the InServ offered a lower total cost of ownership and provided a technically superior solution. When it came to the other vendors proposal, free wasnt cheap enough.

The decision by FreshDirect to reinvest in 3PAR technology after having evaluated the competition is not surprising to us, as its a phenomenon that we have observed time and time again among our install base, said 3PAR President and CEO David Scott. The FreshDirect example shows how the ease of management, high performance, scalability, and flexibility of our InServ arrays offer compelling value, particularly in todays highly virtualised datacentres, even as a customers data and transaction needs grow over time.