The Cloud is 3PAR's Partner
While most manufacturers are trying to determine if the cloud is friend or foe, 3PAR announced in a recent briefing with Storage Switzerland their new Cloud-Agile program, making cloud providers their partners and if their partner is successful, so are they.
In what has to be one of the more unique relationships between supplier and customer to date, 3PAR is partnering with leading providers of cloud based services to help them promote their customers. These providers include companies such as Attenda, DataPipe, Terremark and Verizon Business.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Storage is an essential component of any cloud service provider. Having storage that can help curtail costs, respond to changes in the needs of the business or with 3PAR's help to scale simply, quickly and non-disruptively.
The program is brilliant in its simplicity; stop treating providers like large customers. They are of course, but most customers have limits to how far their IT investment will grow. Service providers have a direct correlation between growth and IT spending. The faster they grow the more IT investment they will need to make. 3PAR's goal is to help them do just that. For 3PAR, cloud service providers are their “channel”, a way to reach SMB/SME and enterprises they might not otherwise reach.
3PAR has made its mark in the hosting provider space, claiming 7 of the top 10 hosting providers as customers. The intelligence of their storage system is almost tailor made for the hosting community; thin provisioning, virtual private array products and autonomic storage all enable the rapidly growing service provider.
Two of the capabilities of their systems are leveraged into the Cloud-Agile under the names 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED and 3PAR Cloud-Agile: ASSURED.
The SECURED solution gives 3PAR partners the ability to provide VPA services—secure, isolated “virtual private arrays”—to their cloud customers as a value-added “shared” hosting option or lower-cost “dedicated” hosting option. The 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED solution employs 3PAR Virtual Domains software to address end user concerns regarding quality of service and security in choosing services delivered over a shared infrastructure.
This solution allows participating providers to deliver high performance levels by leveraging all controller and disk resources for each customer volume while providing secure segregation within a shared, virtualized hardware platform that is protected from unauthorized access, monitoring, and control. Partners offering VPA services through the 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED solution are able to distinguish their multi-tenant infrastructures with the performance and security typically only associated with expensive, dedicated equipment.
The ASSURED solution providers are able to deliver highly available and cost-efficient business continuance solutions which are easy to use, quick to implement, and require only minimal effort to maintain.
This solution leverages 3PAR Remote Copy to offer cost-effective, flexible, and robust remote data replication, DR, and autonomic data backup for end users.
For providers of cloud services, 3PAR's Cloud-Agile program is a compelling opportunity that should be reviewed.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Briefing Report
