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Intercept chooses 3PAR
May 2010 by Marc Jacob
3PAR announced that Intercept, a UK provider of IT services and hosting, has deployed both 3PAR InServ® T-Class and InServ F-Class Storage Server models to support its online and virtualisation offerings. Intercept replaced an inefficient, poorly performing network of six devices with these two resilient, high-performance 3PAR Utility Storage arrays. In doing so, the cloud computing service provider has simplified storage administration, reduced its storage footprint by 67%, and halved storage-related power consumption across its virtual server and desktop infrastructure. In addition, by choosing 3PAR, Intercept’s storage environment now delivers 40% faster performance.
“It was really important for us to see how 3PAR and our virtualised environments worked together, because virtual servers and virtual desktops tend to tax storage performance to the extreme,” said Gary Collins, Chief Information Officer at Intercept. “We wanted to see whether the 3PAR arrays could live up to their reputation. We were amazed to find that the 3PAR arrays performed flawlessly, far exceeding our expectations.”
Intercept is well-known for developing robust, scalable, and cost-effective virtualised and cloud computing solutions for client companies. A contributing factor to its success is that the hosting provider carefully assesses client needs and works with a variety of best-of-breed hardware and software vendors. This enables Intercept to develop individualised IT solutions that improve performance and increase business process agility while reducing costs and environmental impact.
Prior to deploying 3PAR Utility Storage, Intercept was burdened by poorly performing, inefficient legacy storage. Intercept realised that it required a robust and secure storage environment that could offer built-in backup and recovery capabilities and high performance levels. In addition, to support existing and planned virtualisation services, Intercept needed a storage architecture proven to work well with virtualisation technologies.
In choosing to replace its legacy storage with 3PAR InServ arrays, Intercept has built a highly consolidated environment that has been much simpler to manage and that offers superior flexibility—giving Intercept improved agility to meet customer needs more quickly and efficiently. In addition, Intercept has deployed 3PAR System Reporter software for efficient monitoring of performance and capacity usage across storage servers, 3PAR Dynamic Optimisation software for non-disruptively converting data service levels across storage tiers, and 3PAR Thin Provisioning software to reduce up-front storage capacity purchases. In addition, Intercept added rapid data recovery capabilities with 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR Recovery Manager for Microsoft® SQL Server®, which it uses to protect critical applications.
