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As a growing datacentre and managed services provider, success for HDCS depends on the ability to distinguish itself from the competition by providing a level of agility and efficiency not achievable with legacy storage infrastructures. By allowing HDCS to build an effective and flexible managed storage platform at a low cost, 3PAR fit the cloud computing company’s storage needs perfectly. In fact, by deploying highly virtualised 3PAR InServ® T-Class Storage Servers, HDCS reduced their Total Cost of Storage by 60% as compared to purchasing legacy storage systems from a traditional storage vendor—a definite competitive advantage.

“As a proven virtualised storage leader in the enterprise cloud computing arena, 3PAR Utility Storage was the natural choice for enabling us to hit the ground running as a new contender in a competitive environment,” said Chuck Smith, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President at HDCS. “But what truly sold us was that 3PAR was different from the other storage vendors we had dealt with. They really spoke our language, not just in terms of future scalability, but also in terms of translating dollars into cost per useable gigabyte or terabyte—the same way that we communicate costs to our end-users.”

The 3PAR InServ® T-Class Storage Server deployed at the HDCS datacentre in Dallas is part of a broader virtual datacentre deployment based on 3cV, a combination of highly virtualised utility storage from 3PAR with HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades and server virtualisation software from VMware®. This virtual datacentre forms a secure cloud computing environment that enables HDCS to offer highly flexible and highly customisable managed services to its customers.

By targeting companies that have outgrown their current service provider but are still too small for the multi-billion-dollar outsource venture, HDCS differentiates itself by addressing the specific needs of mid-tier enterprises that are traditionally underserved within the current MSP landscape. 3PAR has provided HDCS with the freedom to meet the needs of the companies that fall into this niche without compromising the agility and efficiency that are expected of MSPs.

The native tiered-storage capabilities of the T-Class have allowed HDCS to consolidate multiple tiers of storage and multiple drive classes onto a single array that is highly compact, simple to manage, and easy to grow. With 3PAR, HDCS has the ability to scale non-disruptively and in small increments in order to align storage costs with business growth. In addition, HDCS has realised $100K in annualised administration savings due to the platform’s superior ease of management, which has enabled HDCS to administer their new storage infrastructure with existing resources. With traditional systems, two additional storage administrators would have been required to manage their storage infrastructure.