DEVELOPER TOOLS

3PAR, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today Bare-Metal Provisioning for Solaris-based servers as its newest feature for simplifying Solaris deployments. Built upon 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR InServ Storage Servers, 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning empowers users to deploy Solaris-based servers more rapidly, while managing server farms more simply and efficiently. Solaris is a strategic platform of choice for many enterprises with mission-critical environments, where reduced time to deployment and recovery are crucial. Yet the processes of adding new or repurposing existing servers, restoring failed servers and upgrading server software still involve time-intensive and error-prone steps of first loading and configuring the operating system, and then installing application software on each server. The greater the number of servers, the more pronounced the time and effort required. 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning drastically improves the time-to-market of Solaris server deployments--from bare metal to a functioning server--taking just a few minutes instead of days or weeks to implement with traditional approaches. Using 3PAR Virtual Copy, a software utility that makes hundreds of no-reservation read/write copies within a single 3PAR InServ Storage Server, customers can centrally store and test read-only "golden images" of the Solaris operating system and associated applications. Then, as business demand dictates, users can instantly provision a Solaris host from a read/write Virtual Copy of the appropriate golden image, simplifying and streamlining the process. In the event of a server failure, the replacement server simply points to the failed server's operating system and application image and is immediately brought online. 3PAR takes the challenge and cost out of provisioning, repurposing and restoring Solaris hosts on-demand. 3PAR also simplifies Solaris deployments in other material ways. 3PAR Thin Provisioning reduces the capacity deployed in Solaris environments. In addition, 3PAR's richly featured volume management capabilities are bundled with the 3PAR InForm Operating System and eliminate the need for host-based volume management software licenses and associated maintenance contracts. 3PAR also supports Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager, which is bundled with Solaris, and provides a robust, yet cost-effective, multi-pathing solution for data availability. "Solaris is a strategic platform for our business," said Oswald D'Sa, VP-Technical Operations/CIO at Claria Corporation. "3PAR Utility Storage technology allows us to flexibly manage our Solaris environment with significant cost reduction and quicker deployments." Finally, 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning simplifies the process for rolling out software patches and upgrades to Solaris server farms. As the server operating system changes to meet evolving business needs--new patches, new releases and new features--the process to update each server can be a laborious and costly one. With 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning, software patches and upgrades can be tested centrally and deployed massively in far less time than with traditional means. Upon successful testing, an approved golden image is created and the new release is quickly and efficiently provisioned to the server farm by simply pointing the servers to dedicated golden image snapshots. "Many organizations struggle with costly server management and need to streamline their operations," said Stephanie Balaouras, Senior Analyst at the Yankee Group. "3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning for Solaris is great news for Solaris-based organizations who want to reduce server management overhead and speed up time-to-market deployments." "With 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning, organizations can leverage the powerful features inherent in 3PAR Utility Storage to go beyond simplifying their storage requirements," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "Customers can leverage Utility Storage benefits to their server deployments as well, improving the flexibility and nimbleness of a large portion of their data center." 3PAR's Bare-Metal Provisioning for Solaris is available immediately with Inform Operating System, version 2.2, and requires Virtual Copy, version 2.2.