3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today a development project with Symantec to integrate 3PAR thin provisioning technology with Veritas Storage Foundation to allow granular, automated, non-disruptive space reclamation within the 3PAR storage array. 3PAR and Symantec have teamed together to bring to market an industry first -- the automated use of filesystem-level intelligence to continually optimize storage utilization and deliver infrastructure automation.

"Thin provisioning has quickly become a 'must have' in the fight against low disk utilization, which is cited time and time again as a major pain point for datacenters," said Jeff Boles, Senior Analyst and Director at Taneja Group. "By enabling third party products at the file system level to integrate with thin technology, 3PAR has taken yet another big next step in the evolution of thin provisioning, eliminating the chances that file system formats, and consumption and deletion over time can affect your ability to capacity-optimize your storage. Once again, 3PAR demonstrates the power that comes with making thin more than just a bolt-on technology."

The joint project between 3PAR and Symantec fosters development aimed at giving Storage Foundation the ability to track the mapping of block-level capacity to thin provisioned volumes on 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers. This capability is intended to allow the Veritas File System within Storage Foundation to periodically communicate the location of free blocks to the 3PAR array as file deletions and changes happen within the filesystem. This partnership will enable 3PAR arrays to use this granular filesystem-level information to autonomically reclaim unused space within thinly provisioned virtual volumes, thus maintaining high capacity utilization without impacting host applications.

With this joint effort, 3PAR and Symantec have become the first vendors to announce the development of a granular, intelligent, and automated mechanism for reclaiming unused storage capacity based on the sharing of intelligence gathered at the filesystem level.

"The integration of Storage Foundation from Symantec with the InServ family of utility storage arrays from 3PAR is an exciting prospect for datacenters looking to maintain high capacity utilization and simplify datacenter operations through infrastructure automation," said Josh Kahn, senior director of product management from Symantec. "3PAR pioneered the use of thin provisioning with its utility storage arrays and now, through this joint effort, Symantec is pioneering the use of thin technologies with host filesystems."

"3PAR's leadership in thin provisioning has allowed our customers to significantly reduce IT costs and do more with less through increasing written capacity utilization by up to 75% or more," stated David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "The technology innovation resulting from the unprecedented collaboration between 3PAR and Symantec further develops the thin provisioning ecosystem and paves the way for online, granular, and automated space reclamation to continually optimize written capacity utilization."