3PAR announced a new partnership with SYSDBA in South Africa to deliver innovative utility computing solutions built on 3PAR Utility Storage. SYSDBA offers a portfolio of products that collectively optimize and consolidate their clients' data centers by reducing management overhead and improving resource utilization, ultimately saving their clients money. 3PAR Utility Storage is designed to enable a new generation of utility computing applications such as delivery of enterprise IT as a utility service, cloud computing over the Web, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based applications. The partnership with 3PAR allows SYSDBA to take virtualization beyond the server layer and into the storage infrastructure for greater consolidation, cost savings, and reduction of storage administration for their customers.

Under the terms of the agreement, SYSDBA is authorized to resell 3PAR InServ Storage Servers and 3PAR InForm software—including 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Virtual Copy, Remote Copy, Dynamic Optimization, and Virtual Domains—into the South African market. "South Africa, like the rest of the world, is experiencing a skills crisis," said Chris Bamber, Managing Director at SYSDBA. "Companies need to be able to do more in IT with flat or fewer resources. We chose to partner with 3PAR because their products allow organizations to master storage growth and to more easily implement new storage functionalities while reducing the day-to-day operations workload."

3PAR Utility Storage was developed to serve as the storage foundation of utility computing and was designed to work together with server virtualization technologies to create a complete utility computing environment. 3PAR's highly-virtualized, utility-based approach to storage gives data centers and IT organizations an alternative to traditional monolithic arrays and is intended to give budget-pressured CIOs, service providers, and system administrators the ability to meet service levels in a simpler, more agile, and less costly way. 3PAR Utility Storage is designed to address the needs of open-systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications. With 3PAR Utility Storage, customers have demonstrated the ability to respond instantly to changing business demands while cutting SAN, capacity, energy, and related costs by up to 75%, and have increased administrative efficiency by up to 10x.

SYSDBA has over twelve years of experience delivering quality services and solutions to the top customers in southern Africa with a focus on virtualization and application optimization solutions. "We build solutions addressing the manageability issues faced by datacenters, with TCO models which are relevant to our local market," said Bamber. SYSDBA boasts a very strong service team with over 60% of its staff dedicated to customer service. The company's success has been built on a highly technical sales team that works to understand customer needs and offer solutions rather than promote particular products.

However, SYSDBA has historically been unable to find next-generation storage products to meet the demands of the utility computing solutions they build for their clients. "There is no point in an architecture that can provision new servers in minutes if the storage they require to function requires weeks of setup," said Bamber. "This is why we decided to partner with 3PAR—they are a perfect match for our corporate strategies of delivering solutions for the data center of the future and of bringing the idea of utility computing to life whilst reducing costs and complexity." With the addition of 3PAR Utility Storage, SYSDBA now offers clients solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond the server layer and into the storage infrastructure for greater resilience, agility, and cost savings.

According to Bamber, energy-efficient 3PAR Utility Storage also addresses power challenges present in South Africa, which is facing the prospect of doubling energy costs over the next twelve months. With rising energy costs and power generation not able to keep up with demand, blackouts are a reality for South African data centers. "If you need to run a data center on emergency backup power, then you have to consider technologies such as 3PAR that reduce your power consumption and drive up utilization of your resources," said Bamber.

"We are very excited about this partnership with SYSDBA—not just because this gives us the opportunity to sell into the South African market, but because our company visions are so well aligned," said John Silva, EMEA Partner Sales Manager for 3PAR. "3PAR Utility Storage is designed to enable a new generation of utility computing applications. By partnering with SYSDBA, we are able to deliver the unique benefits of 3PAR Utility Storage to the South African market."