3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, today announced expanded alliance activities with Citrix to target internal clouds, including becoming a Citrix Ready^® Partner, ongoing certification of the 3PAR InServ^® Storage Server with Citrix XenServer^®, and collaboration to integrate the 3PAR Utility Storage platform with Citrix StorageLink™ technology under the Citrix Ready Open Storage Program.

“Citrix XenServer is an enterprise-class, cloud-proven server virtualization platform that delivers the critical features of live migration and centralized, multi-server management,” said John Fanelli, vice president of solutions and community marketing at Citrix Systems, Inc. “3PAR Utility Storage arrays feature storage virtualization technologies designed to improve VM density and reduce capacity requirements, ultimately reducing the server and storage assets necessary for enterprise private clouds. Together, Citrix and 3PAR deliver a server and storage virtualization combination that offers strategic value.”

All InServ Storage Server models have been tested and certified as Citrix Ready for Citrix XenServer 5.5. Joint 3PAR and Citrix customers have experienced the following benefits:

• Up to 50% reduction in physical server purchases. 3PAR Utility Storage has been shown to increase virtual server performance without sacrificing reliability, which allows server virtualization customers to double the number of virtual machines configurable per physical server (also known as “VM density”). This means that XenServer customers are able to purchase and deploy up to 50% fewer physical servers when using 3PAR Utility Storage in place of traditional arrays.

• Simplified administration. 3PAR Utility Storage has reduced customer storage administration time by up to 90%. The platform also includes autonomic storage management features designed to complement the streamlined management of Citrix XenCenter^®, which delivers scalable setup and administration to XenServer environments. The combined benefits of both server and storage virtualization have been shown to result in a leaner, more agile datacenter that requires less time to manage and maintain than environments using traditional storage.

• Greater cost savings. Hyper-efficient 3PAR Utility Storage has been shown to reduce customer storage capacity requirements by using thin technologies to break the traditional link between allocated and purchased capacity. For example, by leveraging 3PAR Thin Provisioning software during the up-front provisioning of storage resources for XenServer, customers are able to maximize virtual datacenter cost savings by purchasing and consuming physical storage capacity only as needed. In addition, 3PAR’s new Get Thin Guarantee program guarantees qualifying customers converting from existing “fat” volumes on traditional storage to new “thin” volumes on 3PAR InServ arrays a 50% reduction in storage capacity necessary to support their XenServer deployments.

Citrix Ready is a product verification program that showcases and recommends partner products, like 3PAR Utility Storage, which can be used with confidence in Citrix environments. The Citrix Ready Open Storage Program is a new program that uses innovative StorageLink technology to facilitate storage platform interoperability with both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft^® Hyper-V™. Under this program, 3PAR and Citrix have agreed to work together to integrate Citrix StorageLink with 3PAR InServ arrays. This integration is aimed at allowing virtual server infrastructures to benefit from the advanced, array-based capabilities of the 3PAR Utility Storage platform.

“The combination of 3PAR Utility Storage and Citrix XenServer has exceeded every expectation we had for our internal cloud,” said Jonathan Levine, COO at LinkShare. “With 3PAR and Citrix, we are able to use the proven Xen hypervisor in conjunction with a storage platform built from the ground up to save time, spend less money, and react more quickly to changing business needs.”

“3PAR’s support for Citrix XenServer and planned integration with StorageLink technology deliver unique, combinatory benefits such as cost, equipment, and time savings,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and CEO. “The flexible, low-cost, virtualized infrastructure produced by combining 3PAR Utility Storage with Citrix XenServer forms an ideal foundation for service providers and other organizations building hyper-efficient, hyper-agile cloud computing datacenters.”

About 3PAR
3PAR^® (NYSE: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized and dynamically tiered storage arrays built for public and private cloud computing. Our virtualized storage platform was built from the ground up to be agile and efficient to address the limitations of traditional storage arrays for utility infrastructures. As a pioneer of thin provisioning and other storage virtualization technologies, we design our products to reduce power consumption to help companies meet their green computing initiatives, and to cut storage total cost of ownership. 3PAR customers have used our self-managing, efficient, and adaptable utility storage systems to reduce administration time and provisioning complexity, to improve server and storage utilization, and to scale and adapt flexibly in response to continuous growth and changing business needs. For more information, visit the 3PAR Website at: www.3PAR.com.