The U.S. Army has selected 3PAR Utility Storage with 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Remote Copy to support its mission-essential Distributed Learning System (DLS) group. DLS selected 3PAR Utility Storage for its ease of use, cost-effective disaster recovery, simple implementation and ability to reduce the cost of storage capacity by 50 percent or more. "With 3PAR Utility Storage, we are able to provide training for U.S. Army Soldiers and units -- anytime, anywhere -- for significantly reduced physical storage cost and effort," said Bob Hall, storage architect for DLS. "3PAR enables us to achieve our training objectives by providing cost-efficient access to critical training programs that are essential to mission success." Additionally, DLS uses 3PAR technology to effectively manage the Army's DLS Continuity of Operations Program (COOP) objectives, which aim to provide minimal disruption to Army training and support for DLS in the event of a system failure or a disaster. To help achieve the required level of reliability, DLS purchased two 3PAR InServ Storage Servers featuring two 3PAR Thin technologies -- Remote Copy disaster recovery software and hyper-efficient Thin Provisioning. After evaluating various systems, DLS found that 3PAR could provide the level of simplicity, flexibility and cost-effectiveness it needed. With 3PAR, DLS improved the reliability of its training program and cut the potential cost of storage capacity by 50 percent using 3PAR Thin Provisioning. In fact, with Thin Provisioning, DLS was able to provision considerably more logical capacity than would have been economically feasible with traditional storage, thereby easing ongoing administration. To allocate an equivalent amount of application capacity with traditional storage platforms would have required many times the physical capacity actually used by DLS. 3PAR Remote Copy will also deliver cost savings by enabling DLS to implement long-distance disaster recovery over IP with no vendor professional services required. Additional savings stem from 3PAR's Thin Copy technology, which ensures that remotely copied volumes only consume physical storage for written-to capacity, not allocated capacity. With 3PAR, DLS is able to scale massively within a single platform and will not be required to manage multiple systems over time. Thanks to the abundant native connectivity of the 3PAR InServ Storage Sever, DLS is able to avoid the purchase and management of SAN switching to support more than ten high availability (HA) hosts for even further operational efficiency and cost avoidance. DLS also employs 3PAR Rapid Provisioning to save time and money by reducing workload, allowing personnel to attend to other high priority issues. "The cost-efficiencies and management benefits that thin-provisioning and quality of storage service features bring to the data center will within the next few years make them 'must have' features with IT organizations experiencing high rates of data growth," said Stan Zaffos, Gartner Research VP, Enterprise Servers & Storage. "We are proud to support training initiatives that will enhance the readiness and safety of the men and women who serve our country in the armed forces," said David Scott, president and CEO of 3PAR. "This opportunity has given us a chance to support a massive Army training initiative while also continuing to demonstrate the incredible cost-saving and efficiency boosting benefits of 3PAR Utility Storage."