A beginners guide to the 3Par storage ecosystem – Part 1 (Introduction)

3Par, a company started back in 1999 by three Sun Microsystems server cluster engineers has had quite a ride since being acquired by HP last year.  HP recently reported that 3Par has realized 90% growth along with moving up substantially on the Gartner magic quadrant.  HP’s staggering exposure and customer base in the industry has allowed 3Par’s commanding voice to be heard by a larger audience that was never possible when the firm only had 300 employees.  EMC, Netapp and IBM were much bigger than 3Par, had seasoned marketing which translated into a bigger foothold and following in the storage industry. 

One common thing I found was that people just don’t understand what made 3Par so special.  I guess the 10+ year old architecture most vendors use have corrupted IT pros.  The price may be a little bit higher than the competitor but I find the most are not comparing apples to apples.  It has been very difficult to find detailed information on the Internet when it came down to understanding the technology.  Now that HP’s marketing power is in the mix I have seen improvements consisting of more documents and case studies being released on a broad scale.   There is still a long way to go and I will help by continuing to evangelize on why you should be looking at 3Par for your cloud/virtualized data center.  With that being said, I have decided to create a series of brief write-ups that will help the IT Professional get there feet wet with the basic understanding of the 3Par world and it’s technologies.  In plain English of course!  My goal is to help fill in the gaps one may experience when starting to learn 3Par.  Sure, there are some guides out there, but these days people IT pros don’t have time to ready hundreds of pages to get the message.  I personally learn best when using visualizations, analogies, hands on action, and by also keeping it simple.  Since I have had the same feedback from countless other people when it comes to technology I will stick to this methodology throughout this series.  Below, I have listed the “topics” that I will be covering on a high level for the first series.  As previously said don’t expect long articles since I list what I feel to be the most important things to know and I prefer to keep my posts brief and succinct.  Due to my schedule I expect to complete one topic per week (hopefully).   I hope this helps you get more comfortable with 3Par, and as always feedback is greatly appreciated.

1.   Introduction to series <- (You are here)
2.   3Par company history  
3.   3Par training and certification offerings
4.   3Par storage array product line
5.   Anatomy/Hardware features of a 3Par Storage System (ASIC, controllers,
      cages, disks, etc)
6.   3Par terms and acronyms defined
7.   InForm Operating System & Software Features (Thin Persistence, Dynamic
      optimization, Peer Motion, etc)
8.   Chunklets explained 
9.   Logical Disks
10. Common Provisioning Groups
11. Virtual Volumes
12. Virtual Domains
12. Conclusion of Series 1