Martin’s Point Health Care Opts for 3par

3PAR, Inc., the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that, by choosing 3PAR Utility Storage to virtualize, consolidate, and expand its storage infrastructure, Martin’s Point Health Care has reduced their total cost of ownership for storage by more than 60%.

Since deploying 3PAR Utility Storage, Martin’s Point has reduced capacity purchases by 25%, cut server and storage administration time by 75%, improved both performance and scalability, and eliminated the downtime previously experienced with their legacy storage infrastructure.

"Our datacenter needed a refresh, and this was an excellent opportunity for us to be rid of the infrastructure limits imposed by legacy storage," said Tom Ackerson, Systems Administrator for Martin’s Point. "Expanding our storage environment with our previous storage vendor would have forced us to expand outside the box rather than within it. Instead, 3PAR offered us an agile and efficient storage platform that eliminated the challenges faced on our legacy storage infrastructure, all at a competitive price point."

Martin’s Point is a not-for-profit health care organization offering both direct care and health plan services to close to 90,000 people in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. As an organization, Martin’s Point has managed to stay at the leading edge of the industry, even as the health care system has become more complex. To find innovative ways to make the health care system more efficient and effective, Martin’s Point required an agile and efficient IT infrastructure that would support critical online services including housing Web-based information portals, online prescription and refill services, and electronic health recordkeeping.

Given the importance of their IT infrastructure, Martin’s Point chose to deploy an entire virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint, which combines the 3PAR InServ Storage Server with products from HP and VMware to create a complete utility computing environment. This has resulted in a 60% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storage for Martin’s Point. This reduction is the result of minimizing storage administration time, maximizing scalable performance and capacity headroom, and decreasing capacity purchases by 25% as compared to expanding their previous storage environment by purchasing storage from a legacy vendor.

Reduced Administration
With 3PAR, Martin’s Point has reduced configuration time by 85% and overall storage administration time by 75%. Their new 3PAR InServ array was up and running in hours rather than days or weeks and Martin’s Point has been able to manage their new utility storage system without the need for a full-time storage administrator, even though their new environment is five times larger than their previous one.

With 3PAR Virtual Copy, the health care organization also saves time and money on database copies because they can create virtual copies of their SQL databases in just seconds – a 99% time savings over the 5-6 hours previously required to complete a full physical copy of each database.

"With a highly virtualized environment, we can now snapshot and manipulate live data without taking down an entire system," said Ackerson. "This was not possible with our previous storage environment."

Increased Scalability, Performance, and Capacity Headroom
"Increasingly, organizations are finding that moving to a virtualized infrastructure can deliver critical benefits such as improved performance, cost-efficiency gains, and greater flexibility," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Virtual servers benefit dramatically from networked storage and are optimized with virtualized storage – which is where 3PAR has a track record of enabling organizations, as exemplified by Martin’s Point, to be more responsive to their users’ needs for dramatically less cost and administrative effort than legacy storage approaches."

The 3PAR InServ uses wide striping of volumes across all disks to eliminate hotspots and ensure high performance levels. In addition, Martin’s Point uses 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software to automatically rebalance volumes when new disks are added, which increases performance levels whenever new capacity is added to their InServ array. With their previous monolithic arrays, when Martin’s Point needed to expand their storage, they had no way to distribute the workload across existing as well as new disks – a factor that limited performance and throughput. Thus far, Martin’s Point has not observed any hard limits on the performance of their 3PAR array, something that cannot be said of storage purchased from their previous vendor.

In addition, Martin’s Point found that the 3PAR InServ offered significantly more logical connections to SQL Server hosts without licensing fees or other restrictions – promoting affordable, flexible datacenter expandability. Previously, Martin’s Point could only connect 10 hosts to each of their storage arrays. Now their InServ array supports more than 50 host connections without additional hardware and has no licensing limits for SQL servers. This was another source of savings for Martin’s Point since their legacy storage system’s licensing scheme forced cost and scalability issues with regards to adding new SQL Server hosts.

"Non-profits simply cannot afford to invest in technologies that don’t offer a solid return on investment. The virtual datacenter introduces storage challenges that traditional technologies are not architected to address," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "Our utility storage systems have been developed with the demands of the virtual datacenter in mind, combining agility with both CAPEX and OPEX savings that enable organizations like Martin’s Point to extend their resources and better serve their communities."