3PAR announced that TheLadders.com cut their total cost of storage in half by replacing their legacy storage infrastructure with 3PAR Utility Storage. The online job search website deployed 3PAR Utility Storage in conjunction with server virtualization from VMware as part of a datacenter virtualization initiative. This initiative reduced the company’s storage capacity requirements by 66%, which also reduced storage administration time. In addition, by consolidating onto a single, highly virtualized 3PAR InServ Storage Server, TheLadders.com was able to eliminate the use of separate arrays for different applications and reliance on costly consulting services.

“By allowing us to cut our storage TCO by 50%, 3PAR was clearly the most cost-effective solution,” said Frey Kuo, Director of Information Technology and Operations, TheLadders.com. “However, it wasn’t only about the financial benefit. With 3PAR, we now have the ability to add storage at the drop of a hat and the platform’s superior reliability and high performance protects our critical end-user experience.”

With their legacy storage environment, TheLadders.com had to justify the roadmap for data growth on a per-project basis since the total lifetime capacity required for each individual project had to be purchased up front. This situation limited the number of projects that could be initiated in any given year due to cost constraints associated with purchasing all of this capacity at the outset. With 3PAR, TheLadders.com is not only able to scale their storage environment painlessly, but they are able to buy additional storage on an incremental basis and only as needed. This allows the leading online job search website to save on up-front capacity purchases, ease roadmap justification, initiate more projects, and reduce the cost of housing, powering, and cooling their storage.

For TheLadders.com, meeting their growing storage requirements by purchasing legacy storage would have required 200% more capacity than was required by deploying 3PAR Utility Storage. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, TheLadders.com is able to purchase only the storage capacity it needs, and only when it is actually needed, thereby reducing up-front capacity and energy costs by 75% and lowering storage administration to a fraction of what it was before. Storage configuration tasks that took days or weeks to complete with legacy storage took just hours with their new 3PAR array.

With the website listing more than 8,000 new jobs each week across every industry, it was important that the storage infrastructure at TheLadders.com be scalable while also protecting the end-user experience. Their 3PAR InServ distributes all workloads over all system resources for reliability and high performance. TheLadders.com has found automated rebalancing with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, in combination with the array’s native mixed workload support, to be extremely beneficial. This has enabled the online job search website to maintain robust and consistent performance and avoid disruption when scaling their storage environment.

“TheLadders.com is one of many Internet and Web 2.0 companies that have come to us looking for cost savings and have stayed with us for our superior simplicity, efficiency, performance, and reliability,” said David Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer for 3PAR. “Legacy vendors are plagued by inefficient, inflexible architectures and a rigid business model. Our customers understand that there is a far better alternative that is well suited for businesses seeking a leaner, more agile approach.”