3Par unveils midrange array with four controllers

Computerworld - 3Par Inc. today unveiled a new line of midrange storage servers based on a quad-controller architecture. The company said the new arrays offer greater throughput and capacity and require less power than its previous midrange offerings.

3Par said the new InServ F-Class Storage Servers can be clustered for greater performance, offer features and benefits typically associated with high-end arrays, and carry an starting $80,000 price tag usually associated with midrange products.

The InServ F-Class arrays include four controllers -- unusual for midrange Fibre Channel arrays, analysts said. Rick Villars, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm IDC, said the midrange storage market's traditional dual-controller array architectures had "not changed in more than 15 years."

"The quad-controller, Mesh-Active architectural shift announced by 3Par is long overdue for midrange storage," Villars said. "It's great to see them bringing these features to the midrange market during these difficult economic times." The upgrade improves the efficiency and simplifies the administration of midrange systems, he added.

Unlike the dual-controller midrange arrays -- where each LUN (logical unit number or volume) is active on only a single controller -- 3Par said its so-called Mesh-Active architecture allows each LUN to be active on every mesh controller in the array, thereby delivering more load-balanced performance. Thus, the new F-Class array can save money by allowing users to purchase up to 50% fewer arrays while increasing capacity utilization and reducing power use and cooling requirements, the company added. Fewer servers also means that companies need less floor space to run them, it said.

The F-Class arrays also feature 3Par's Gen3 ASIC, which processes data and metadata independently in different processor and memory subsystems within the controllers, eliminating the effect that sequential workloads (like data mining or backups) can have on transactional workloads such as databases, the company said. Most legacy midrange arrays must be deployed for either transactional or sequential workloads -- a limitation that further encourages array sprawl.

In addition, 3Par said its F-Class arrays support virtual domains, a type of storage hypervisor that allows users to create hundreds of virtual arrays, each with secure management domains for different departments or user groups, and thin provisioning, which further reduces power, cooling and floor-space requirements. The F-Class array also supports what 3Par calls "Fast RAID 5," which delivers performance within 9% of RAID 1 to midrange users.

The F-Class arrays run the same InForm Operating System used on the company's high-end InServ arrays. "With the InForm OS, 3Par customers have been able to reduce administration time by up to 90% by eliminating tedious manual capacity planning," the company said in a statement. "The InForm OS offers instant, application-tailored provisioning through fine-grained virtualization, intelligently and autonomically managing provisioning to simplify storage administration."

3Par's InServ F-Class Storage Servers are now available.

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