3PAR has announced that the Carphone Warehouse, an independent retailer of mobile phones and services with 700 stores in the UK and 1,300 in continental Europe, has deployed two 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers. Working together with IT consultancy Computacenter Services, the Carphone Warehouse chose 3PAR as the online storage standard for its new virtual data center to increase utilization rates, improve performance, simplify storage management and ultimately accelerate the time to market for new applications.
 
"With 3PAR Utility Storage, we have demonstrated a 50 percent reduction in storage TCO while significantly increasing overall service levels," said Steven Gall, enterprise architect at the Carphone Warehouse. "With 3PAR, we can do so much more than we anticipated."
 
Over the past three years, the Carphone Warehouse -- which employs over 12,000 people -- experienced exceptional growth thanks to increases in its customer base, portfolio additions such as landline phone services provider TalkTalk and acquisitions such as AOL UK. As a result, online storage requirements leapt from a single terabyte to several hundreds and the cost and complexity of traditional storage architectures revealed their true colors: unacceptably low utilization rates for existing server and storage resources and slow time-to-market for new initiatives.
 
To address these concerns and meet its objectives, the Carphone Warehouse decided to move to a utility computing environment based on storage virtualization through 3PAR Utility Storage as well as server virtualization running on VMWare ESX with cost-effective Linux servers and IBM System p5 servers featuring Advanced Power Virtualization and Virtual I/O.
 
"3PAR Utility Storage was the ideal answer to the Carphone Warehouse's need for better efficiency, increased scalability and ease of use," said Terry Walby, datacenter solutions director, at Computacenter Services. "Managing unpredictable growth in demand with adequate and cost-effective levels of server and storage provisioning is a great challenge for many of our customers for whom Computacenter Services is able to offer a range of innovative and flexible utility infrastructure solutions. With 3PAR technology we were able to offer the Carphone Warehouse a unique combination of flexibility, affordability and scalability which not only met their current needs but also provided a platform for growth."
 
3PAR Utility Storage's deployment in the Carphone Warehouse's virtual data center aims to:

• Eradicate downtime associated with performing data warehouse Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) procedures in its Informatica/Oracle environment, without the need for additional storage capacity.
  
  
• Increase utilization rates via storage consolidation for both Disaster Recovery and Test and Development onto a single, massively scalable system.
  
  
• Accelerate deployment of new applications with 3PAR Virtual Copy, built on Thin Copy technology, which eliminates the days required to provide or refresh data test images.
  
  
• Increase productivity through non-disruptive data migrations with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization.
  
  
• Reduce the time required to provision storage -- from days to just seconds -- with 3PAR Rapid Provisioning.
  
  
• Eliminate the complexity and required expertise to implement and maintain Disaster Recovery thanks to 3PAR's Thin Copy-based, remote mirroring technology called 3PAR Remote Copy.

"It is becoming increasingly important for IT departments to deploy just the right amount of capacity over time and provision capacity according to the exact needs of the business," said Claus Egge, IDC's European program director for storage research. "Solutions such as the 3PAR array family show an engineering commitment to giving such functions high priority."

"I am very pleased to add the Carphone Warehouse to 3PAR's expanding list of European customers. Our steady growth outside North America has been a key factor in the overall success that 3PAR has been enjoying," said David Scott, president and CEO of 3PAR. "Utility Storage is a proven solution for organizations with data intensive storage needs. Whether from the retail, internet, telecom or financial markets, companies all need to become more competitive. 3PAR gives them the ability to streamline their storage environment and reduce costs dramatically."