The storage industry can be confusing - even to insiders. For example, people often compare 3PAR and Compellent because both companies are "newer" vendors working their way up against established competitors.
But that's about where the comparisons end. 3PAR arrays scale to performance levels that far exceed Compellent's. While it may be possible to attach the same number of drives to both arrays, when you push them both for total throughput, 3PAR crushes Compellent. With 100+ drive systems, there is no comparison. If you think you might need hundreds of drives, instead of less than 100, it's a slam dunk for 3PAR.
With less than 100 drives, our product lines overlap and that's probably where the confusion comes from because 3PAR's F-Class arrays compete with Compellent's. Our smallest F Class - the F200 scales from 16 to 192 drives and its bigger brother the F400 scales from 16 to 384 drives (with the addition of 2 more mesh active controllers). FWIW, you won't saturate a 3PAR controller by loading too many drives on it - the F Class controllers can handle 192 15K RPM drives with overhead to spare. Realistically, its probably not fair to Compellent to compare any of their systems to one of our quad controller F400s.
Nobody handles mixed workloads like 3PAR. Which means customers can put many different applications on our arrays and get excellent performance from their systems at very high disk utilization levels. Don't just take my word for it, see what our customers have said on TechValidate. (will require a login - it's not a 3PAR site). The key to this is the fine-grained allocations of storage combined with true wide striping - not based on pools and metas and hypers and such.
Both companies have delivered important storage virtualization innovations to the industry. 3PAR didn't invent thin provisioning, but we forced the issue in the industry and now it's a mandatory feature in all enterprise arrays. FWIW, our work in storage efficiency and utilization technologies continues and you can expect to see more from us in the future that allows customers to get the most from their capacity. We are always happy when customers dig deeper into this technology and compare our reservationless thin storage with any other vendor's thin implementations.
In Compellent's case, the delivery of Data Progression has been a key stimulus to the rest of the industry. EMC's FAST technology, due in its first release late this year is a clear attempt to catch up with Compellent. However, just as Thin Provisioning is not a 3PAR invention, the ability to move data between storage tiers is hardly a Compellent invention. When I was at EqualLogic, the product had the ability to move data automatically between tiers of storage spanning different systems. Their evacuate and replace capabilities rely on their automated tiering technology.
3PAR introduced it's Dynamic Optimization (DO) product in 2005, which redistributes data from one set of resources across an expanded or different set of resources. For instance, today a customer can add new drives to a 3PAR system and redistribute volumes across all the drives in the system using DO. They might do this for either capacity or performance reasons - or both. With storage capacity needs continuing to grow, it's important to be able to scale with performance and agility. When you add new drives to a 3PAR system, their capacity is a reservationless resources that can be used by any application, on demand - including for use as snapshots for existing or new applications.
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