Pricing Drives User To Upstart Storage Vendor

Jarrett Goetz, senior manager of IT infrastructure at Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biotech company founded in 2001 with $85 million in funding,, had the big vendors in, and has had previous experience with the leading storage systems. But in the coming weeks, he's going to extend his investment in storage gear from start-up 3PAR. Within days, the storage vendor will declare one of its first wins, but Goetz is already singing the technology's praises, while he lambastes the leading storage vendors.

Goetz is about to top out at his current 4 Tbyte storage capacity limit because he's got 60 scientists generating thousands of slides per quarter, each containing 4 images of up to 320 Mbytes. Before his value-added reseller (VAR) told him about 3PAR, he had narrowed the vendor field to Dell, which was promoting EMC products, and Sun, which was pushing HDS. With those vendors, he said, up front costs would be high, and on-going software costs would get even higher because vendors raise the software license prices when capacity goes up. Deployment would take weeks and weeks, lots of meetings, and a platoon of consultants. "Those traditional products send start-ups into bankruptcy," Goetz said.

According to Goetz, his VAR and one 3PAR consultant had the 3PAR system up and running in a half hour. "I thought they were joking," said Goetz. A few Infinity people joined Goetz in trying to break the system for two hours, and that was it. "One of the other vendors wanted us to go away for a week for training," said Goetz. "So 3PAR saves us half a million on the initial costs, hundreds of thousands on deployment, and millions on the software costs." 3PAR separates capacity levels from software costs in pricing.

Goetz is looking forward to a Thin Provisioning software feature from 3PAR that will let him set aside available disk space for anticipated peaks in demand and only start paying for it if it becomes a permanent chunk of capacity. "Before 3PAR, we were going to hire a real expert SAN manager," he said, "whom we don't have in house now."