Ariba Inc., provider of spend management solutions, has selected 3PAR Utility Storage with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization to support its on-demand infrastructure. Ariba relies on 3PAR Utility Storage to deliver its highly available, highly responsive on-demand spend management solutions to customers worldwide.
 
"You simply will not ever gain the leverage required to deliver software as a service (SaaS), or any other true IT service, without having an infrastructure capable of operating as a utility," said Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder of the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Any software company looking at a SaaS model today needs to think about utility computing and utility storage or all they really are is an outsourcer."
 
Through its spend management software and service offerings, Ariba helps companies enable people, processes and technologies. This in turn allows Ariba's customers to reduce risk, optimize resource management and enhance competitive advantage in the global marketplace. In addition to hosted, behind the firewall and outsourced offerings, Ariba provides its solutions through an on-demand hosted software model, which is designed to free end users from the complexity and cost required to install and support their own application infrastructures. In advancing this SaaS model, Ariba found that its previous online storage hosting environment -- based on monolithic arrays -- was hampering progress and increasing costs. After evaluating alternatives from traditional NAS and SAN vendors, Ariba selected 3PAR Utility Storage to support its complete on-demand infrastructure.
 
According to 3PAR, Ariba's previous choice of storage platforms was more expensive to own, upgrade and support. With 3PAR Utility Storage, Ariba is now able to add performance, connectivity and capacity in affordable and independent increments -- all within a single system.
 
With 3PAR, Ariba is able to use the native connectivity of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server to support over 20 host servers per site in order to avoid the cost and complexity of a redundant switching infrastructure. Ariba also reduced storage costs by using 3PAR Dynamic Optimization to tailor RAID service levels to various applications dynamically. In addition, the company is now able to transition simply and non-disruptively from one configuration to another, assuring that performance and storage efficiency are appropriately balanced.
 
"Compared to our previous storage environment, we've dramatically reduced costs with 3PAR Utility Storage," said Dan Grillo, director of Hosting at Ariba. "The simplicity of the InServ has also resulted in a significant reduction in storage administration effort."
 
Since deploying 3PAR Utility Storage -- which automatically spreads all data evenly over all system resources (disks, processors, loops, etc.) -- storage is no longer a bottleneck. Ariba has also boosted service levels through greater data recoverability. Using 3PAR Virtual Copy -- a non-duplicative and reservationless snapshot technology -- Ariba is able to take snapshots of every database four times a day and then retain those snapshots for a week. This process produces hundreds of affordable and easily mountable recovery points. For added protection and recoverability, Ariba utilizes the broad internal tiering capabilities of the InServ by maintaining an isolated full physical clone of each database on affordable 3PAR Nearline drives.

Ariba's previous storage environment was less flexible and more difficult to scale in response to business changes and rapid growth. Now Ariba is able to scale within a single, self-configuring, load-balanced system. With 3PAR Rapid Provisioning, Ariba provides application-tailored storage in a matter of seconds, with no time-consuming planning activities or costly professional services.
 
"One of the biggest business issues Ariba is addressing at the moment is the move to an on-demand delivery model," said Grillo. "3PAR has greatly reduced our concerns about storage during this transition."
 
"As a SaaS provider, you want storage to be as simple and efficient as possible," said David Scott, president and CEO for 3PAR. "With Utility Storage, service providers measurably enhance their competitiveness and value-add for customers."