ExactTarget Selects 3Par for Mission-Critical SaaS

3PAR announced  that ExactTarget, a provider of on-demand, email and one-to-one marketing
solutions, has made a significant investment in utility storage,
purchasing multiple 3PAR InServ Storage Servers to support its
mission-critical Microsoft® SQL-based application services. For its
permission-based, custom email delivery and tracking services,
ExactTarget also chose 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic
Optimization based on their combined ability to improve capacity
utilization over the data lifecycle.

"We
originally chose 3PAR for its industry-leading thin, non-disruptive
Data Lifecycle Management and, as a result of the platform’s simplicity
of operations, we’ve already demonstrated a 75% reduction in storage
administration effort," said Jim Saricos, Director of Data and
Performance Management for ExactTarget. "In addition, we believe that
our decision to invest in the 3PAR platform will cut our capacity and
array purchase requirements by at least 50% as compared to other
systems," said Saricos.

Thousands of organizations worldwide, including The Home Depot, Papa
John’s, Cold Stone Creamery and Careerbuilder.com, rely on the
ExactTarget platform for their integrated email marketing needs. With
nearly a billion outgoing emails each month, ExactTarget required a
high performance, cost-effective storage environment that could keep
pace, and deliver tiered storage to control the company’s increasing
quantity of data. With a growing customer base, the new environment
would also need to address both demanding IOPS and latency requirements.

After considering storage platforms and conducting a rigorous
performance evaluation, ExactTarget chose highly virtualized, clustered
and modular 3PAR Utility Storage. ExactTarget found that 3PAR uniquely
delivered two to four times the performance of similarly configured
systems being considered from traditional vendors. The 3PAR InServ
achieved these performance results with the use of cost-effective 10K
drives, without requiring manual load balancing across storage
controllers or disks, and without any RAID group planning or
configuration effort.

ExactTarget required a simple means to tier its data. To maintain the
ability to serve all current and historical customer data 24×7,
ExactTarget needed a ‘no-delete’ and ‘always-on’ customer data policy.
Meanwhile, ExactTarget’s customer data was growing daily, with as many
as hundreds of millions of new records generated per day. ExactTarget
chose 3PAR Utility Storage in order to consolidate customer data onto a
single, integrated platform, and thereby eliminate the need to purchase
and manage multiple classes of array to support different
price/performance tiers.

According
to Saricos, ExactTarget selected 3PAR Dynamic Optimization to eliminate
time-consuming and disruptive data migrations that would otherwise be
required between multiple arrays. With 3PAR Dynamic Optimization,
ExactTarget foresaw that its customers’ data could be non-disruptively
tiered to meet the requirement for cost-effective 24×7 access to all
data. ExactTarget also purchased 3PAR Thin Provisioning–which is fully
integrated with Dynamic Optimization–so that its customer data could
be "kept thin" over the entire online data lifecycle for even greater
capacity utilization.

In order to achieve a
complete utility computing environment, ExactTarget has paired highly
virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage with complementary technologies
including Egenera BladeFrames, highly virtualized blade servers — and
PolyServe Matrix Server, highly efficient and scalable SQL clustering.

3PAR

ExactTarget, Inc.