The 3PAR Gen3 ASIC in each 3PAR Controller Nodes acts to communicate and move data between controllers across this passive, full-mesh backplane. Each application workload is distributed and shared across all system resources in a massively parallel fashion. This approach differs substantially from other quality of service schemes based on the purchase and ongoing management of dedicated (not shared) and often underutilized system resources.

The 3PAR Gen3 ASIC was also designed to alleviate performance concerns and cut traditional array costs by allowing the InServ to deliver mixed workload support. With the InServ, transaction- and throughput-intensive workloads run without contention on the same storage resources. This is made possible through parallelizing data movement (with the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC and associated Data Cache) and metadata processing (using Intel CPUs and associated Control Cache) within each Controller Node.

In addition, the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC supports 3PAR Fast RAID 5, a unique capability through which 3PAR customers have reported achieving high levels of performance with 33% less storage capacity. The abundant memory bandwidth and built-in RAID 5 XOR engine within the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC allows 3PAR's Fast RAID 5 to deliver performance levels comparable to RAID 1 without the higher data protection overhead.

Building Block for Cloud Computing
As organizations build out their virtualized infrastructures to support the delivery of enterprise IT as a utility service via cloud and self-service computing models, they are turning to server virtualization, blade servers, and utility storage technologies. With its distinct architectural advantages, Thin Built In hardware, and superior performance, the InServ T-Class is purpose-built to meet the needs of these virtualized datacenters.

"With mounting interest in cloud and self-service computing as delivery models for enterprise IT as a utility service, it's increasingly important for organizations to build cost-effective and sharable virtualized IT infrastructures based on utility computing architectures," said David Scott, CEO of 3PAR. "With its unique, 'Thin Built In' architecture, the T-Class is a storage building block designed to do just this."

A wide array of companies are enabling a virtualized platform for cloud and self-service computing with 3PAR Utility Storage, including Brocade, Data Domain, Emulex, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, Riverbed, Symantec and VMware.