SaaS Provider Uses Utility Storage to Expand Customer Base and Launch New Services for Less

3PAR announced today that CEDAR document technologies, a leading provider of technologies and services for print and electronic customer communication platforms, chose 3PAR Utility Storage to consolidate and expand its storage infrastructure. With 3PAR, CEDAR has improved the performance of its Managed Service offerings, accommodated a 5x increase in transaction volume and reduced total cost of storage by nearly half a million dollars. CEDAR used 3PAR Utility Storage to upgrade its storage infrastructure to accommodate a new class of customer while reducing capacity requirements by 50%—an approximate CAPEX savings of $200,000—and to avoid an estimated $250,000 investment in storage administration costs for additional OPEX savings.

“Our legacy infrastructure was not sufficient to handle our emerging customer base,” said Anthony Tarone, Director of Service Operations for CEDAR document technologies. “Adding bigger customers with new service offerings, higher volumes, tighter SLAs, and more demanding processing would have caused stress to our storage environment beyond an acceptable level. 3PAR enabled us to effectively serve a new class of customer by giving us the performance and agility we desired. Their utility storage platform also enabled us to align capacity purchases with actual customer usage, essentially enabling a capacity on demand growth model. With 3PAR’s dynamic optimization and storage virtualization I can non-disruptively rebalance data across newly added storage resulting in both a capacity increase and performance increase.”

Deploying 3PAR also alleviated the VMware performance and utilization issues that CEDAR was experiencing with respect to their direct attached storage (DAS) environment. CEDAR now runs all of its Virtual Machines on 3PAR Utility Storage and plans to leverage more VMware products going forward. The superior fit between VMware and 3PAR has made it possible for CEDAR to increase the use of targeted server virtualization across their enterprise.

3PAR Utility Storage has also increased CEDAR’s flexibility. Similar to what CEDAR delivers to its clients, with 3PAR, growth and change management are simplified as CEDAR expands the capacity of their array or as customer demands fluctuate. Prior to deploying 3PAR, CEDAR was forced to purchase capacity before completely understanding the storage needs of their new customers. This led to low utilization rates and wasted capacity. 3PAR Thin Provisioning has taken the guesswork out of capacity purchases by enabling CEDAR to add storage on an as-needed basis while maintaining high service levels. Since capacity can be added non-disruptively and incrementally, it is no longer necessary for CEDAR to purchase or allocate large amounts of capacity up-front, which has cut CEDAR’s capacity purchases in half.

In addition to the CAPEX savings offered by 3PAR Thin Provisioning, CEDAR has experienced additional hardware savings by addressing all of their storage needs with highly economical Nearline (enterprise-class SATA) drives. Although 3PAR InServ Storage Servers support the use of multiple storage tiers, CEDAR’s decision to deploy only Nearline drives with wide striping for their production and development environments has resulted in cost savings and increased performance levels without sacrificing redundancy. With 3PAR, CEDAR has been able to meet all of their service level targets without the premium Fibre Channel drives typically required for online data.

“One of the advantages of utility storage is that it provides a level of agility not possible with legacy systems,” John Webster, Principal IT Adviser at Illuminata. “The ability to quickly, flexibly address diverse or unplanned workloads is critical, particularly in SaaS and Web 2.0, where rapidly adding new customers and services are essential to business survival.”

The built-in ease of management that CEDAR has experienced with 3PAR Utility Storage has enabled the MSP provider to avoid expanding its SAN engineering staff to accommodate new customer needs, saving an estimated quarter million dollars in administration costs as compared to purchasing a traditional SAN solution. CEDAR has also gained increased visibility into their storage environment with the use of 3PAR System Reporter. The service provider now generates more detailed reporting without the need for professional services.

“Our incumbency with SaaS providers is largely due to the fact that not only is 3PAR Utility Storage extremely cost-effective as compared to traditional storage, but the flexibility of our platform gives businesses an agility that has real value in this economy,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Our utility storage systems are optimized for the virtual datacenter, enabling SaaS providers to be more responsive to customer needs for dramatically lower cost and administrative effort than is possible with legacy storage solutions.”