Leading To-Go Ordering Provider Cuts Costs, Assures Scalability With 3PAR

FREMONT, Calif., March 13 /PRNewswire/ — 3PAR(R), the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Jacent, a leading provider of on-demand ordering solutions for the restaurant and hospitality industries, has deployed 3PAR Utility Storage with Virtual Copy and Thin Provisioning to support its Web-based, mission-critical Ordering-On-Demand platform. Jacent selected the 3PAR InServ(R) Storage Server because it offers a high performance and high availability storage infrastructure with unmatched simplicity and efficiency.

“A highly responsive, available, yet cost-competitive IT infrastructure is key to our success,” said Venky Rangachari, Vice President of Operations at Jacent. “With 3PAR Utility Storage, we estimate that we have cut our total cost of ownership for storage by two-thirds over competing platforms while still being able to meet our rigorous service level demands.”

Through its centralized, Web-based Ordering-On-Demand platform, Jacent helps its clients — including national restaurant chains such as Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza and Round Table — enhance their end-customers’ ordering experience, optimize resource management, increase brand loyalty and enhance competitive advantage. With Jacent’s Ordering-On-Demand solution, to-go order management is centralized, streamlined and quality-assured–thereby eliminating the potentially distracting and error-prone process of accepting to-go orders on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis.

Early on, Jacent sought “utility-like” infrastructure with its storage by leveraging a managed IT service provider. As success and transaction volume soared, Jacent determined that owning and operating its own storage infrastructure would be more advantageous. While meeting the demand for high and predictable levels of service over time was critical, Jacent could not afford to give up the simplicity and efficiency of its prior utility model. After considering alternatives from other vendors, Jacent selected the 3PAR InServ E200 Storage Server to support multiple MySQL(R) databases on RedHat Linux across several Hewlett Packard c-Class blade servers. Network file system (NFS) services are supported through ONStor(TM) network attached storage (NAS) gateways.

Simplicity

Jacent needed a smooth transition to their new in-house utility storage platform, as well as future flexibility and ease of scaling in response to business changes and rapid growth. This meant that simplicity was a key requirement for Jacent with respect to storage consolidation. 3PAR was the only vendor that did not require extensive training or expensive consulting services as part of this consolidation. With 3PAR Rapid Provisioning, Jacent provisions application-tailored storage in a matter of seconds, with no time-consuming planning activities or costly professional services required. As a result, Jacent is able to manage 3PAR Utility Storage without full-time storage professionals. Two system administrators manage servers and storage, with only ten percent of their time spent administering the 3PAR Utility Storage array.

Efficiency

Through 3PAR’s unique capacity-saving technologies, Jacent is able to utilize abundant useable capacity while expending only minimal amounts of physical capacity. For example, with 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Jacent has been able to drive storage utilization rates to 80% or more by eliminating the need to reserve physical capacity for unwritten data. Studies show that traditional storage technologies — which dedicate physical capacity proportionate to every terabyte of useable capacity — can force users to accept average utilization rates of just 25%.

Jacent also leverages 3PAR Virtual Copy — a non-duplicative and reservationless thin copy technology — to provide optimally efficient copies of its databases for reporting and analysis instead of requiring full physical clones of each database. Lastly, Jacent has squeezed capacity costs even more by leveraging 3PAR’s fast RAID 5 technology for all of its applications, including its most demanding high transaction MySQL databases. 3PAR’s fast RAID 5 delivers high performance comparable to that of traditional RAID 1 mirroring, yet with a significant improvement in storage utilization.

Additionally, with 3PAR, Jacent has been able to trim storage infrastructure costs by avoiding the cost and complexity of a redundant switching environment. By leveraging the abundant native connectivity of the 3PAR E200 array, Jacent is able to support highly available direct connectivity to over a dozen blade servers and NAS gateways.

“The sustainability of the business models of Web 2.0 services depends heavily on efficient IT cost structures,” said Anne MacFarland, Director of Data Strategies and Information Solutions at The Clipper Group, Inc. “Such cost efficiencies are made possible by revolutionary approaches to storage utilization and access such as those 3PAR Utility Storage offers.”

“Jacent is yet another great example of how Utility Storage is enabling Web 2.0 companies to gain competitive advantage,” said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. “The simplicity and cost-efficiency of Utility Storage gives Web 2.0 enterprises the ability to do more with less, enabling them to manage data more effectively and meet rigorous service level demands while dramatically reducing their total cost of ownership for storage.”

About 3PAR

3PAR is the leading provider of Utility Storage, a simple, efficient and massively scalable tiered-storage array for utility computing that lets customers serve more with less. 3PAR Utility Storage can cut an organization’s Total Cost of Data by 50%. Capacity and related costs can be cut by 75% while storage administration and associated expenses can be reduced by 90%. 3PAR Utility Storage is ideal for open systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management and performance-intensive applications.

3PAR is based in Fremont, California, and has offices in Bracknell, UK, Stuttgart, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan. The company’s corporate headquarters are located at 4209 Technology Drive, Fremont, CA 94538. Phone: 510-413-5999, fax: 510-354-3070, email: salesinfo@3pardata.com, Web site: http://www.3par.com/ .