Science & Technology 
Science and Technology
Science and Technology 
Mon, February 23, 2009
3PAR: 3PAR Fills Prescription for Growth at LifeScript
FREMONT, CA--(Marketwire - February 23, 2009) - [ 3PAR ]® (
LifeScript delivers health guidance and resources to women over the internet using a cloud computing delivery model. This service delivery is backed by a resilient, agile, and high-performance utility computing infrastructure built on next-gen Utility Storage arrays from 3PAR and server virtualization from VMware®.
"When 3PAR came along, we were firmly committed to growing our traditional storage infrastructure in response to increasing storage capacity needs following server virtualization migration onto VMware," said Jack Hogan, Chief Operations Officer for LifeScript. "After further investigation, however, it quickly became obvious that 3PAR offered us both capacity savings and intelligent integration with VMware to curb storage costs and provide greater performance and agility."
As a top-10 commercial health Website and the #1 Website dedicated to women's health, [ LifeScript.com ] attracts approximately four million unique visitors and 30-40 million page views monthly. In addition, the Web 2.0 portal has approximately 10 million subscribers to its six daily email newsletters. LifeScript's business-to-consumer model relies on email newsletters and a highly focused database to drive traffic to its Website. Accordingly, LifeScript must be able to store a large amount of email history data and have immediate access to that data at all times. Availability and uptime are critical since downtime and degraded performance are detrimental to online business.
"In today's challenging economic environment, we're seeing SaaS and Web 2.0 datacenters under pressure to become leaner and meaner, and many are turning to virtualization to achieve this," said Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst & Consultant at Taneja Group. "However, these organizations are often surprised to discover that server virtualization is not a silver bullet. Rolling out VMware on top of an inflexible and inefficient traditional storage infrastructure fails to address deeper inefficiencies -- which is why any and every organization deploying server virtualization needs to take a long, hard look at their storage infrastructure."
LifeScript purchased the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization for nondisruptive and autonomic system resource balancing and 3PAR Thin Provisioning software for capacity savings. LifeScript was extremely impressed with 3PAR's ease of installation and ongoing maintenance. LifeScript's 3PAR system was up and running in a matter of hours and did not require specialized training like their previous storage. With 3PAR, time to deployment for new storage has increased four-fold, a benefit that has greatly enhanced LifeScript's business agility.
"With 3PAR, we can grow reliably, affordably, and more easily than previously possible -- without risking performance levels or reliability -- even during peak usage periods," said Hogan.
"The Web 2.0 portal takes full advantage of the native tiered-storage capabilities of the 3PAR array, using economical Nearline drives for development and user acceptance testing while using Fibre Channel drives for production Web servers," said Gary Rizo, Director of IT Operations for LifeScript. LifeScript's enterprise email infrastructure also utilizes 3PAR's Thin Provisioning software, which allows the IT department to safely allocate upfront as much logical capacity as is conceivably needed over the application's lifetime.
In addition, the online portal uses 3PAR Fast RAID 5, a unique capability proven to deliver high levels of performance with less storage capacity. The abundant memory bandwidth and built-in RAID 5 XOR engine within each InServ Controller Node allows Fast RAID 5 to deliver performance levels comparable to RAID 1 but with one third to two thirds less data protection overhead.
"LifeScript's utility computing infrastructure really showcases the cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and automation of 3PAR Utility Storage and its benefits for virtual server environments," said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. "Not only does 3PAR enable datacenters to reliably deliver services via the cloud using less storage capacity, but our Utility Storage platform is incredibly responsive to growth."
About LifeScript.com
LifeScript is the #1 website dedicated to women's health. The company provides practical, female-friendly content on diet and fitness, weight loss, anti-aging, relationships, family health and other topics. Through its newly redesigned portal, [ LifeScript.com ], LifeScript inspires women to be proactive about their health. It also provides a platform for advertisers to reach the Internet's most active health decision-makers. LifeScript now ranks #10 in commercial health sites (comScore) and #3 most popular health and well being site on the Hitwise index. The site averages approximately 4 million unique monthly site visitors and approximately 10 million subscribers to its 6 daily e-newsletters. Founded in 1999, LifeScript also packages and sells a proprietary line of customized vitamin plans and soy shakes in addition to its core media business. The company has 56 employees and is based in Mission Viejo, California, with offices in New York City and Beverly Hills.
About 3PAR
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