Real Partnerships for Virtual Private Arrays

Earlier this week 3PAR rolled out the Cloud Agile Program with our charter partners, Attenda, DataPipe, Terremark and Verizon Business.   The mission of Cloud Agile is to bring 3PAR's efficient and scalable enterprise storage capabilities to a wide range of customers through cloud (utility) service partners. 

One of my favorite aspects of Cloud Agile is the concept of a virtual private array, which is the same idea as a virtual private server, but applied to storage. Customers of our Cloud Agile partners will be able securely manage their own thin slices of our arrays, taking full advantage of massive wide striping and thin provisioning. 

Comments

[nate]

Does 3PAR support NPIV yet? Last I checked it wasn't supported yet, NPIV would be a pretty helpful function for this type of service..

[marc farley]

Nate,
NPIV is a nice idea but there are still some kinks that need to be worked out.

[Bill]

NPIV itself just "works" with most arrays (3PAR included) but implementations vary, and have bugs! It's one of those things that, while the standard exists, you have to press every vendor to see if their implementation is supported by the vendors that connect to them.

I believe that 3PAR supports HP's NPIV implementation on Virtual Connect, and Brocade's Access Gateway mode, if my recollection holds true. It's really not a matter of supporting NPIV (it's a standard, and fits into FC quite nicely). It's a matter of the initiator-side vendors supporting it well and relatively bug-free. The target side is pretty easy.