ACADEMIA
3PAR Saves Cvent Half a Million Dollars in Storage Administration
3PAR Lightens SaaS Provider’s Cloud, Reducing Capacity Requirements on New Virtual Machines by 95%
3PAR announced today that Software as a Service (SaaS) provider Cvent, Inc., has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage to consolidate internal systems, support mission-critical SaaS offerings via the cloud, and replace cumbersome and inefficient tape-based backup. A 3PAR customer since 2004, Cvent has realized a total savings of more than half a million dollars in storage administration costs alone by consolidating onto 3PAR Utility Storage. These savings, combined with the native simplicity of 3PAR Utility Storage and the unique built-in features offered by 3PAR InServ Storage Servers, are the reason that Cvent has continued to choose 3PAR for all of the company’s major storage initiatives as the SaaS provider’s internal and external needs have grown.
“After five years, 3PAR continues to provide us with substantial cost savings,” said Dwayne Sye, Chief Information Officer for Cvent. “As our needs evolve, we periodically re-evaluate the enterprise storage market and have found that 3PAR continues to innovate and deliver market-leading technologies at competitive price points. 3PAR has stayed ahead of the competition by offering compelling, leading-edge features, and that helps my organization to stay ahead of our competition.”
Cvent’s SaaS offerings, which include Web-based event management meeting site selection and event sourcing tools, employ a cloud computing delivery model built on highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage and server virtualization from VMware. With 3PAR, Cvent’s mission-critical SaaS infrastructure—which supports more than 12,000 users—has experienced increased system availability, improved resource utilization, and greater agility in adding new hosts, which now take less than a day. Most impressively, 3PAR Thin Provisioning has enabled Cvent to reduce their up-front raw capacity purchase requirements on new virtual machines by 95%.
With 3PAR, Cvent has also scaled seamlessly and painlessly from 1 TB to more than 105 TBs on two InServ arrays. The incremental scalability and growth that 3PAR provided has been strategic for Cvent which, due to the nature of its business, cannot always predict future growth accurately.
“3PAR solves some of our most demanding challenges. The company’s sales and support staff have demonstrated how a virtualized SAN and compelling features like Thin Provisioning, Virtual Copy, and Remote Copy can play a key role in business process improvement,” said Sye. “Equally as important is how easy the SAN is to manage. 3PAR has dramatically simplified SAN administration and that has helped make our InServs an invaluable part of our enterprise infrastructure.”
Despite massive growth, Cvent still does not require a dedicated, full-time storage administrator for its 3PAR deployment, which has meant an annual savings of more than $100,000 per year. Prior to deploying 3PAR, Cvent spent hours managing their entry-level SAN, which was deficient and difficult to use and required tedious capacity planning. With autonomic 3PAR arrays, time-consuming manual tasks such as disk layout optimization, capacity additions, data migration, hot spot diagnosis, and other issues that come along with traditional SAN systems are now a thing of the past.
“3PAR’s virtualized architecture is unique in the marketplace and addresses key pain points in a way that other vendors just haven’t been able to do,” said Curtis Breville, Senior Analyst, Storage Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “You really have to look under the covers—several other vendors have mimicked 3PAR’s claims, but they just don’t have the built-in, virtualized, and autonomic architecture that provides the flexibility and simplicity of management that 3PAR does.”
Cvent also chose to deploy 3PAR for its own internal IT needs. The SaaS provider has implemented 3PAR Utility Storage to centralize its internal storage environment and implement efficient and reliable backup and recovery. 3PAR Virtual Copy and Remote Copy have taken Cvent from an 8-hour daily backup process with a 75% success rate to an instantaneous process that is completely reliable. As a result, Cvent has improved internal operations on multiple fronts—by raising backup frequency from daily to every four hours with 3PAR Virtual Copy; by enabling an on-demand, self-service model for deleted file recovery that eliminates the need for support engineers; and by reducing recovery point objectives for corporate data from an average of two weeks to two hours with the help of 3PAR Remote Copy.
“3PAR’s sophisticated snapshot and replication technology solved all of our disaster recovery problems virtually overnight, and I continue to be impressed with the simplicity and ease with which it was deployed and is managed,” said Sye.
“3PAR’s incumbency with SaaS providers means that companies like Cvent know to come to us for easy-to-manage, high-performance, cost-effective centralized storage,” said 3PAR CEO David Scott. “The fact that our customers continue to come back to us time and time again to help them solve their key business challenges demonstrates how our advanced virtualization technologies, combined with the native simplicity and efficiency of our utility storage platform, deliver benefits that traditional storage vendors simply cannot not offer.”