Stephen Foskett wrote about the various perspectives in cloud storage recently. I thought is was a good read. By his definition, 3PAR is a Cloud Infrastructure vendor. I thought this line was interesting:
"Indeed, cloud cynics and skeptics would be forgiven for thinking of them as yesterday's fish wrapped in today's newspaper, since the technologies involved have changed very little from the pre-cloud era."
Indeed, a 3PAR array would appear to be just another tin box with power, processors, cables and disk drives inside. Of course, we are proud of the hardware engineering, but its the logical stuff that separates 3PAR storage from the pre-cloud era. I want to make a point here: 3PAR started with a vision of making a clustered storage server, which was a radical departure from anything else at the time, and it turns out that this vision fits in extremely well with the infrastructure requirements of cloud service providers. This was not a case of 3PAR adopting "cloud speak", but a case of cloud companies adopting 3PAR.
The unique power of the 3PAR storage server comes from the integration of several breakthrough technologies, such as:
Reservationless storage - no pools or complex disk layouts, no trapped snapshot or replication space
Thin provisioning - efficient, fine grained, just in time, allocation of capacity
Wide striping - not within pools and not subject to best practice caveats, striping at the lowest level
Mesh Active controllers - expanded access to storage resources within the storage server
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