Enhanced Performance
3PAR designed the InServ family of arrays to deliver high levels of performance and consolidation simply and affordably, so that customers don't have to overprovision capacity or resort to complex administration to increase performance and improve utilization. To demonstrate the power of the new InServ T-Class, 3PAR has posted record-setting SPC-1 results in which the 3PAR InServ T800 achieved a total of 224,989.65 SPC-1 IOPS, an SPC-1 Price-Performance of $9.30/SPC-1 IOPS, and a total ASU capacity of 77,824 gigabytes. With these results, the InServ T-Class more than doubles the performance of the InServ S-Class to become the fastest single-system storage array as measured by SPC-1 results on file with the SPC.

The SPC (www.storageperformance.org) is a vendor-neutral standards body focused on the storage industry. SPC benchmark results such as the SPC-1 are intended to provide a source of comparative storage performance information that is objective, relevant, and verifiable. SPC benchmarks are designed to be vendor and platform independent and are applicable across a broad range of storage configurations and topologies. Any vendor may sponsor and publish an SPC benchmark result provided their tested configuration satisfies the requirements of the appropriate SPC benchmark specification. The SPC-1 benchmark uses a single workload designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage subsystem while performing the typical functions of business-critical applications.

An IBM System p5 595 server was used to drive the SPC-1 benchmark load to the 3PAR T-Class. "The IBM System p5 595 provides exceptional scalability, making it superb to drive a high-end storage benchmark," said Scott Handy, VP of Worldwide Strategy, IBM Power Systems. "The combination of IBM Power Systems with the 3PAR T-Class enables customers to meet the performance demands of their mission-critical UNIX applications."

The InServ T-Class arrays feature the only single-system storage architecture to report 224,989.65 IOPS in a published SPC-1 result, which was achieved with 83% capacity utilization and without complex configuration or performance tuning. According to results on file with the SPC, this makes the InServ T-Class the only modular array capable of delivering performance in excess of 224,000 IOPS right out of the box, without performance-enhancing techniques such as "short stroking," a common practice whereby vendors leave physical capacity space unaccessed in order to speed disk performance.

"With more than 1.6 million jobs and 23 million unique visitors to our site each month, performance is critical to our business, but so is simplicity and ease of use," said Ali Shahzad, Storage Architect at CareerBuilder.com, the largest online job site in the United States. "The 3PAR T-Class offers the kind of performance we require, right out of the box."

Innovative 3PAR InSpire Architecture Featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC
3PAR's InSpire Architecture was designed to ensure high and predictable levels of performance for all workloads -- even under failure conditions -- as well as high utilization rates for purchased resources. Central to the InSpire design is a high-bandwidth, low-latency backplane that unifies cost-effective, modular, and scalable components into a highly available and autonomically load-balanced cluster.