3PAR

3PAR
Name	3PAR
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Computer data storage
Founded	1999
Fate	Acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2010
Headquarters	Fremont, California, United States
Key people	David Scott, Elliott Advisors (investors)
Products	Enterprise storage arrays, thin provisioning, utility storage
Parent	Hewlett-Packard

3PAR

3PAR was an American company that designed and sold enterprise storage systems and software, known for innovations in thin provisioning and clustered storage architectures. Founded in 1999 in Fremont, California, the company became a notable player in the storage industry competing with firms such as EMC Corporation, NetApp, IBM, Dell EMC, and Hitachi Data Systems. Its technology influenced later developments in flash storage, virtualization integration, and cloud infrastructure used by organizations including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, and large financial institutions.

History

3PAR was founded by a group of engineers and entrepreneurs in 1999 amid the dot-com boom, positioning itself in the competitive landscape alongside companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft. Early investors included venture firms and private equity groups that had previously funded startups such as Netscape Communications Corporation and StorageTek. In the 2000s 3PAR released products that emphasized thin provisioning and utility-style storage models, attracting customers across sectors like telecommunications, healthcare, and banking. The company became the subject of acquisition interest from major vendors; a bidding contest culminated in a successful acquisition by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 after previous approaches by Dell Inc. and speculation involving EMC Corporation. Post-acquisition, 3PAR technology was integrated into HP’s storage portfolio during the eras of Meg Whitman and Mark Hurd, contributing to services offered by HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) after HP’s corporate split.

Architecture and Technology

3PAR’s core architecture centered on a highly parallel, clustered controller design influenced by research in scalable systems and parallels with designs from Google and Amazon (company) that favored horizontal scaling. The systems used an intelligent thin provisioning engine and chunklet-based data distribution that allowed fine-grained allocation similar in concept to ideas advanced by Michael Stonebraker in database sharding and by architectures seen at VMware, Inc. for virtualization. The controller software implemented wide striping, RAID variants, and automated load balancing across back-end enclosures, integrating support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and later, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) — technologies common in deployments by HP Labs and peers like NetApp. 3PAR also adopted persistent metadata structures and reclamation routines that reduced write amplification, a concern shared with flash pioneers such as Toshiba and Samsung Electronics.

Products and Models

3PAR produced a range of arrays tailored to enterprise and midrange markets, often designated by model families reflecting capacity and performance tiers. Early offerings competed with arrays from EMC Corporation's Symmetrix and IBM's DS series. Subsequent generations included systems optimized for solid-state media to rival flash arrays from Pure Storage and hybrid platforms similar to those from Hitachi Vantara. HP marketed several rebranded lines after acquisition, positioning them alongside HP StoreOnce backup appliances and HP StoreServ controllers. The product roadmap included dense disk shelves, mixed-drive enclosures, and all-flash options designed to meet workloads from virtualization platforms like Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Systems, and VMware.

Software and Management

3PAR’s management software suite offered features comparable to enterprise offerings from Dell Technologies, NetApp, and EMC Corporation, including thin provisioning, snapshots, replication, and quality of service controls. The software integrated with orchestration and management frameworks from Microsoft System Center, VMware vCenter, and cloud management products used by providers such as Rackspace. APIs and command-line interfaces enabled automation for DevOps teams employing tools influenced by projects from The Apache Software Foundation and Linux Foundation ecosystems. After HP’s acquisition, 3PAR management was folded into HP’s storage management portfolios and aligned with initiatives from Hewlett Packard Enterprise for converged infrastructure.

Performance and Scalability

3PAR systems emphasized parallel I/O paths and modular expansion to provide linear scalability — an approach echoed by hyperscale firms like Facebook and Google that favored commodity scaling. The chunklet architecture permitted fine-grained redistribution during rebalancing and failover, improving utilization and reducing hot spots compared to monolithic LUN-based approaches used by legacy arrays from EMC Corporation and NetApp. Performance benchmarking by third parties placed high-end 3PAR systems in contention with arrays from IBM and Hitachi Data Systems for transactional workloads, OLTP databases from vendors such as Oracle Corporation and SAP SE, and VDI scenarios championed by virtualization vendors.

Market Position and Acquisition

Before acquisition, 3PAR held a notable share of the enterprise storage market, particularly among customers seeking thin provisioning and utility storage economics. The 2010 acquisition by Hewlett-Packard ended a bidding war that had included Dell Inc. and public discussion by analysts at firms such as Gartner, Inc. and Forrester Research. Post-merger, 3PAR technology was integrated into HP’s strategy for cloud and enterprise storage and later influenced offerings under Hewlett Packard Enterprise after the 2015 corporate split between HP Inc. and HPE. The acquisition reshaped competitive dynamics with incumbents like EMC Corporation (later Dell EMC) and NetApp.

Use Cases and Notable Deployments

3PAR arrays were deployed in diverse environments, including finance firms running trading platforms tied to New York Stock Exchange operations, healthcare systems integrating electronic records in the style of Cerner Corporation deployments, and service providers offering Infrastructure as a Service similar to offerings from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Telecommunications carriers and content providers used 3PAR to support large-scale virtualization and database workloads akin to deployments by Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc.. Academic and research institutions leveraging big data projects referenced architectures used by CERN and other large-scale computing centers when assessing 3PAR for storage consolidation and high-availability requirements.

Category:Computer storage companies