3PAR announced today a new alliance partnership with Exanet to expand the options for file services on 3PAR Utility Storage by supporting Exanet ExaStore Clustered NAS Servers. Exanet’s Clustered NAS allows organizations to utilize for file system deployments the same efficiency, scalability, and performance benefits that 3PAR InServ Storage Servers provide for block-level storage consolidation. Several customer sites have successfully deployed 3PAR and Exanet file services environments, including AudienceScience in Seattle and Interactive One, a division of Radio One in New York that runs top-ranked social networking site BlackPlanet.com as well as news and entertainment websites.

“AudienceScience is pleased with the performance, scalability, and cost of the combined 3PAR and Exanet solution, which has improved our overall performance while decreasing the physical drives and associated storage footprint by 60%," said Brandon Mason, VP of Technology at AudienceScience. "Due to the highly-virtualized nature of the 3PAR platform, we are able to leverage the same physical spindles to support both NFS and FC protocols simultaneously and efficiently."

“Deploying 3PAR Utility Storage with ExaStor Clustered NAS immediately doubled our file system performance and greatly increased our ability to affordably scale our environment,” said Nicholas Tang, Interactive One’s Vice President of Technical Operations. “By allowing us to consolidate our primary unstructured data storage needs onto the InServ array, the 3PAR and Exanet combination has given us a scalable, high-performance infrastructure to serve our rapidly expanding user base.”

The combination of ExaStore Clustered NAS and 3PAR Utility Storage addresses the requirements of customers who need to add file services to 3PAR block-level storage environments or need to deploy a dedicated NAS file system with 3PAR storage, as was the case at both AudienceScience and Interactive One. Together, 3PAR and Exanet offer massively scalable storage with performance that scales linearly and non-disruptively from two to eight nodes—ensuring that customers can effortlessly expand the performance and capacity of both the Exanet gateway and 3PAR InServ array.

While Exanet’s Clustered NAS system provides connectivity to protocols like NFS and CIFS, it retains the data reliability characteristics of the underlying storage array. This means that 3PAR customers using Exanet’s Clustered NAS can take advantage of key 3PAR InServ capabilities like Fast RAID 5 and the InServ’s high availability features. Customers can also deploy 3PAR’s superior SAN block services directly to applications as needed.

As part of this partnership, joint 3PAR and Exanet customers are assured that the 3PAR InServ and Exanet’s Clustered NAS are fully tested and qualified for interoperability. In addition, 3PAR and Exanet have established a joint support agreement to ensure seamless support by both companies’ worldwide support organizations. The 3PAR and Exanet systems are available directly from their respective companies in the Americas as well as European and Asia-Pacific regions.

“The ExaStore Clustered NAS Server provides a massively scalable file system with many of the same architectural benefits as the 3PAR InServ, such as high resource utilization and linearly scalable performance,” said Mark Weiner, CEO for Exanet. “ExaStore Clustered NAS enables businesses to optimize workflow, increase productivity, and lower the total cost of ownership of storage.”

“In today’s tight-budget environment, organizations cannot afford the performance bottlenecks, capacity limitations, and wasteful energy, cooling, footprint, and administrative cycles required to operate and manage legacy storage,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Exanet and 3PAR deliver an agile and efficient combination that allows organizations to deploy cost-effective NAS and SAN on a single consolidated storage platform.”