3par, Carrenza Hosting and Comic Relief Team Up

3PAR, Inc. announced that the cloud computing platform used to support Comic Relief’s latest charity event, Sport Relief 2010 – managed by Carrenza Hosting and built on 3PAR InServ Storage Servers, HP BladeSystem Servers, and VMware vSphere – has helped raise a groundbreaking GBP 31.6 million so far, and counting.

As a technology partner for the 2010 Sport Relief campaign, 3PAR donated the use of a second InServ T400 Storage Server to supplement the existing T-Class array already deployed at Carrenza Hosting. This technology contribution from 3PAR, combined with the cloud computing platform provided by Carrenza, helped Sport Relief take in the highest donations total in Sport Relief history. The money raised will be spent by Comic Relief to transform lives in the UK and across the world’s poorest countries.

"Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in Sport Relief this year, helping to raise over GBP 31.6 million so far," said Marcus East, Head of Future Media and Technology for Comic Relief. "Our technology partners for the Sport Relief 2010 campaign have played a crucial role in making these thousands of online donations possible, and we’re hugely grateful for their support."

Last year, 3PAR and Carrenza Hosting came together to assist Comic Relief in processing GBP 57.8 million in online charitable contributions for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day 2009. This year, Carrenza’s award-winning, cloud-based Utility Computing Services (UCS) platform – built on the combination of products from 3PAR, HP, and VMware, a proven blueprint for the virtual datacenter also known as ‘3cV’ – was once again used, this time to support Sport Relief 2010. The UCS platform processed an extraordinary 386,524 donations over 7 hours during the Sport Relief TV event on March 19th, with a peak of 125 donations per second – a four-fold increase in peak traffic over the previous Sport Relief TV event in 2008.

"The 3PAR InServ has proven itself to be the ideal storage platform to support our cloud-based services," said Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza Hosting. "This is evident in our collective success for this year’s Sport Relief campaign."

"We feel it is a privilege to continue supporting Comic Relief with a technology donation that has once again helped facilitate the extremely important work of Comic Relief through both Red Nose Day 2009 and Sport Relief 2010," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "This year’s massive success has demonstrated that the transformative technology built into our storage arrays can also be used to help change lives."