APPLICATIONS

3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today 3PAR InServ Storage Server support for IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing for AIX (HACMP). HACMP cluster technology is IBM's flagship high availability technology that provides monitoring, failure detection and automated recovery of business applications on IBM AIX servers. For the first time, HACMP customers can deploy Utility Storage--a simple, cost-efficient and massively scalable storage platform--to complement their mission-critical AIX environments. "IBM HACMP technology brings customers peace of mind with superior planned and unplanned downtime protection,” said Jeffrey Howard, IBM’s Director of System p Offering Management. “Now with 3PAR support for HACMP clusters, high availability AIX customers have access to the benefits of IBM HACMP technology and 3PAR Utility Storage.” IBM’s AIX operating system is the strategic platform of choice for many enterprises with mission-critical environments where downtime can lead to lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction and reputation damage. To avoid these issues, enterprises often deploy high availability cluster technologies such as HACMP in conjunction with highly available, high-end storage systems. However, even though these storage systems can offer high levels of storage performance, scalability and high availability, they are costly to implement and can be complex to administer. As an alternative, enterprises may opt for more affordable dual-controller, midrange storage--but in doing so they compromise availability and face increased downtime risk. 3PAR Utility Storage resolves this dilemma by offering a highly available, massively scalable, clustered architecture that delivers high and predictable levels of performance--even under failure conditions--for dramatically less cost than high-end arrays. This includes robust remote replication capabilities--via 3PAR Remote Copy--for disaster recovery of AIX environments. Additionally, 3PAR Multipath I/O (MPIO) for IBM AIX provides simple and efficient path failover and recovery for high availability environments. 3PAR Utility Storage introduces completely new levels of simplicity and efficiency to highly available AIX environments. For example, 3PAR Thin Provisioning enables one-time provisioning of mission-critical logical storage to AIX systems while reducing deployed physical capacity by 50% or more. 3PAR Virtual Copy, built on Thin Copy technology, allows users to take hundreds of reservationless, non-duplicative snapshots of mission-critical data sets, providing cost-effective access to many possible recovery points. "With this announcement, 3PAR offers a compelling storage platform for high-availability AIX customers," said Dave Reine, Director of Enterprise Systems at The Clipper Group, Inc. "For anyone considering high availability for AIX, the benefits of combining IBM HACMP cluster technology with 3PAR Utility Storage should not be ignored." "With 3PAR’s support of IBM HACMP technology, AIX customers can now combine the benefits of highly available server clustering with the simplicity and efficiency of 3PAR Utility Storage," said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “Our joint customers get to achieve more with less, now with added resilience and less risk. What’s not to like?” 3PAR InServ Storage Server support for IBM HACMP technology is currently available with IBM System p5 servers.