3par Saves Mary Kay 50% in Storage Capacity

3PAR, Inc. announced today that Mary Kay, a direct seller of skin care and color cosmetics, has reduced storage capacity and associated energy requirements by 50 percent by deploying highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage.

With 3PAR, Mary Kay has reduced storage costs by 20 percent and achieved an administration time savings of 60 percent over legacy storage, which is not virtualized. Since deploying 3PAR, Mary Kay has not only reduced CAPEX and OPEX, but has also significantly increased high availability in their storage environment. In addition, 3PAR Utility Storage has given Mary Kay superior performance and scalability in their storage infrastructure, enabling the cosmetics giant to better meet customer demands.

"We needed high-performance storage that was highly reliable, available, and extremely economical. Plus it needed to retain these benefits while scaling to meet future growth," said Todd Thelen, Technology Leader at Mary Kay. "This is precisely what 3PAR delivered."

Mary Kay products are sold in more than 35 markets worldwide, online and through the company’s global independent sales force, which exceeds 2 million. To better serve its independent beauty consultants and their customers, the cosmetics company needed a highly virtualized storage infrastructure to support the core applications necessary for the online business that accounts for 97 percent of the company’s total revenues. In addition, Mary Kay was looking to simplify their storage environment and their online look and feel. The company required a robust storage infrastructure that would allow them to expand their global footprint while simultaneously addressing existing reliability, availability, and performance issues pertaining to their online business.

"3PAR Utility Storage has proven itself to be a very competitive offering and a highly reliable solution in comparison to the legacy storage technology we have utilized," said Thelen. "3PAR’s advanced virtualization technologies helped us feel more comfortable with mixed workloads, and the platform’s efficiency has allowed us to achieve administration time savings of up to 60 percent."

Mary Kay has met its worldwide storage needs by implementing six 3PAR InServ Storage Servers for its existing datacenters in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the United States. The superior agility and efficiency of the 3PAR Utility Storage platform combined with its compelling economics have enabled the beauty company to do more with less. For example, Mary Kay’s entire worldwide storage infrastructure is now managed by only three full-time administrators – something that would not have been possible by purchasing legacy storage technologies. In the United States, database backup replication between 3PAR InServ arrays in Dallas and a second US location provide an affordable, reliable, low cost recovery point for Mary Kay’s mission-critical databases.

"By nature, Internet companies have high performance and availability requirements which are compounded by unpredictable data storage requirements," said Gene Ruth, Burton Group senior storage analyst. "This means they need more cost-effective ways to scale without compromise. Storage vendors that can deliver products into this demanding environment will win customers and provide market leadership."

3PAR’s Utility Storage is also more compatible with VMware than Mary Kay’s legacy storage environment, meaning that the cosmetics company is no longer saddled with possible failures when migrating VMs. Previously, when Mary Kay needed to move VMs from one server to another, they experienced failures if the storage environment could not handle the transition. With 3PAR Utility Storage, Mary Kay is not burdened with these VMware compatibility and performance issues. This has allowed the cosmetics company to transition to a highly virtualized datacenter with less effort than was required previously.

With 3PAR, Mary Kay delivers completely reliable and flexible applications without compromises at the lowest possible cost. For example, 3PAR has helped Mary Kay improve their end user experience for less – less capacity, less power, and fewer administrative resources than required by legacy storage arrays. With 3PAR, Mary Kay has also increased granularity of management through robust tools such as 3PAR System Reporter, which allows the cosmetics company to avoid performance issues that could impact customers. In addition, Mary Kay is now able to deliver 24×7 availability to users. Both business and application availability have improved since internal migrations no longer require disruption. 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software allows Mary Kay to migrate data across storage tiers without interruption, giving the company the agility to adjust service levels ‘on-the-fly’ to better serve its online customers.

"Mary Kay has not only deployed 3PAR worldwide, but they have been a loyal repeat customer, returning again and again to replace inefficient legacy arrays with agile and efficient utility storage," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "With 3PAR, Mary Kay has the agility to scale on demand plus the resilience to handle almost anything that comes their way."