Utility Storage Delivers Big Energy, Capacity, and Administration Savings for the LiveOffice Cloud 

3PAR announced today that cloud-based email archiving provider LiveOffice has saved more than half a million dollars by reducing capacity requirements, administration costs, and power consumption after deploying 3PAR Utility Storage. LiveOffice also reduced their datacenter footprint by 66% as a result of replacing three legacy storage arrays with a single 3PAR InServ T-Class Storage Server.

Boasting over a decade of experience in the messaging industry, LiveOffice has built a premier client roster that ranges from established Fortune 100 companies to fledgling start-ups. LiveOffice has grown rapidly over a short period of time and now has more than 9,000 clients. This success can be attributed to LiveOffice’s software plus service delivery model, through which the cloud-based archiving and messaging solutions provider guarantees its customers both rapid deployment and 99.99% uptime. To customers, this means unlimited mailboxes that are always accessible. To LiveOffice, this means that deploying new mailboxes quickly and non-disruptively is just as critical as keeping costs down.

“Two years running we’ve been on the Inc. 5000 annual list of the country’s fastest-growing companies,” said Alexander Rusich, Founder and Chairman of the Board at LiveOffice. “So not only do we need a storage infrastructure that keeps pace with this growth by scaling ‘on the fly’, but also one that supports the performance, availability, and reliability that our clients have come to expect. This is exactly what 3PAR delivered—at roughly half the cost and one-third the datacenter footprint of the legacy storage vendors that we evaluated—and without the need for specialized staff or consulting services.”

With 3PAR, LiveOffice has already saved $300,000 on disk purchases thanks to 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, which enables the SaaS provider to allocate storage only as it is actually required for Exchange data writes. LiveOffice’s InServ T-Class array has allowed them to double the number of mailboxes they can accommodate. With the legacy arrays that LiveOffice evaluated, storage supporting application data had to be allocated up front—regardless of whether or not all of that allocated capacity would ever actually be used. Eliminating this allocated but unused capacity has enabled LiveOffice to consolidate onto a single InServ to achieve additional savings in the form of 50% less power consumption and a 66% reduction in datacenter footprint.

When compared against the InServ T-Class, the legacy storage arrays that LiveOffice evaluated required double the cost to achieve the same performance numbers as the 3PAR InServ T-Class. Scalability with the 3PAR InServ was also more cost-efficient than the legacy offerings that LiveOffice considered. In addition, LiveOffice was surprised to find that 3PAR gave their in-house applications greater resiliency as compared to their legacy storage infrastructure because it enabled them to quickly and efficiently protect and to instantly recover mailboxes using 3PAR Virtual Copy.

“The transition over to 3PAR has been a smooth one and the T-Class array has fit perfectly into our datacenter,” said Rusich. “While we weren’t too concerned, we were happy to see that applications such as VMware performed much better and made management much easier after we installed a 3PAR array into our datacenter.”

With 3PAR, simplified storage administration has also produced a significant time and cost savings for LiveOffice. With their previous storage, provisioning a new customer could take days, but with the administrative simplicity of the 3PAR T-Class, this process has been reduced to hours or even minutes. And while their InServ T-Class is managed with current administrative resources, storage purchased from legacy vendors would have required a headcount increase and an additional $260,000 per year in administration costs.

“Like so many of our customers, LiveOffice came to us through word of mouth—recommended by one of their own clients,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “But it was in going head-to-head against a veritable ‘who’s who’ of legacy storage vendors that the InServ T-Class virtually sold itself by offering cost and performance benefits that LiveOffice couldn’t afford to ignore.”