5 Things I Love About 3PAR

Coming from an EVA background 3PAR was very new to me.  Right away there were several features that stuck out that I really like:

1)  VAAI Integration –  3PAR fully supports VAAI with its VAAI plugin for Vsphere.  You can read more about that here

2) Rapid Provisioning –  This is perhaps my favorite thing about 3PAR, from suffering through pain in LUN management and presentations in ESX clusters the past several years….3PAR offers Autonomic Groups simplifying volume provisioning by the use of Autonomic Host Groups or Volume Groups when a new host is added to a host group all volumes are autonomically exported to the new host, likewise when a new volume is added to a volume group it is autonomically exported to all hosts in the group.  This can save hundreds of clicks literally.

3) Scalability-  I like how you can add additional controller nodes through upgrade paths in the F400, T400, T800

4) Hardware Based Thin Provisioning – Utilization of 3PAR Gen3 ASIC enables fat to thin without impacting workloads  hardware > software Also thin provisioning in Oracle

5) Replication – built in Gigabit ethernet ports not only can you add a card for Fiber Channel FCIP replication, you can use the built in Gigabit ethernet ports for replication….Remote copy = easy mode not hard to setup.

6) Really Active/Active – Unlike other midtier arrays from other manufactors who have both optimized and non optimized paths from the controller to the LUN all 3PAR paths are optimized.  This is similar to high end arrays like Hitachi and Symetrix.  You can read about it here on page 4
What I was impressed by is this holds true in both F Series and T Series systems. 

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