3PAR recently introduced its 3PAR InServ F-Class Storage Servers, developed to overcome the technical limitations of traditional midrange arrays, offering features and benefits typically associated with high-end arrays but at a mid-range price.

Scaling up to four clustered, Mesh-Active controller nodes, InServ F-Class arrays are designed to eliminate the scalability, efficiency, and management sacrifices typical with midrange arrays. F-Class arrays are intended to save organizations money in three ways: by allowing them to purchase up to 50 percent fewer arrays, by eliminating up to 75 percent of the capacity, power, cooling, and floor space required with traditional storage, and by enabling customers to spend up to 90 percent less time managing their storage.

"In these difficult times companies are placing more demands on their midrange storage systems than ever before. They are expanding their use of server virtualization, disk-based backup/recovery, and business analytics," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems research at IDC. "Solutions like 3PAR's new F-Class arrays -- with their meshed, quad-controller architecture -- provide companies with peace-of-mind that they can rely on an efficient and simple midrange storage system that won't run out of horsepower as their needs grow."

The quad-controller hardware design of the F-Class allows greater consolidation and reduces midrange array sprawl by enabling customers to purchase and deploy up to 50 percent fewer systems as compared to traditional arrays.  

The F-Class arrays feature a Mesh-Active controller architecture. Unlike legacy “active-active” midrange controller architectures, where each LUN (or volume) is active on only a single controller, 3PAR’s Mesh-Active architecture allows each LUN to be active on every mesh controller in the array, thereby providing more robust, load-balanced performance and greater headroom, automatically.

F-Class arrays also feature the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with Thin Built In in each Controller Node for scalable mixed workload support. Data and metadata are processed independently in different processor/memory subsystems within the controllers, eliminating the large impact that sequential workloads (like data mining or backups) can have on transactional workloads such as databases. Without mixed workload support, legacy midrange arrays must be deployed for either transactional or sequential workloads but not both, a limitation that further encourages legacy array sprawl.

 Additionally, F-Class arrays from 3PAR support 3PAR Virtual Domains, which facilitates greater storage consolidation by allowing users to create hundreds of virtual arrays, each with secure management domains for different departments or user groups. 

“The advanced features of the 3PAR InServ F400 come without the performance and scalability compromises that we typically associate with midrange storage arrays,” said Gregory Thomas, Vice President of IT at Managed Healthcare Associates. “At a time when we are looking to ‘get more for less’, the F-Class is really a high-end array fit for our midrange array budget.”