Managed service provider Claranet has taken steps to boost its data centers’ performance with an investment in HP’s 3PAR high speed storage system.

The former internet service provider turned MSP has invested over £1 million in solid state disk (SSD) technology to create a new shared storage platform across three of its data centers. Its new three-tiered model of storage will provide a better foundation for its growing hosting service business, according to Claranet.

Under the promised improved regime, each storage tier will have a guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for its numbers of input/output operations per second (IOPS). The standard and premium tiers of service will now be delivered entirely by SSD consisting of HP 3PAR arrays. This new capacity for quantifying storage service means Claranet can offer a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model, where customers pay on a monthly basis, depending on the number of GB storage space they have used.

Greater flexibility

This gives customers greater flexibility in how they store and access their data and helps achieve low latency for their real-time applications, said Neil Thomas, Claranet’s product director. “Claranet manages petabytes of customer data in its data centers, with a lot of this managed on shared storage platforms,” said Thomas, “These shared platforms now allow customers to pay as they go and buy storage as they need it, on an OpEx basis, as a fully managed service.”

The increasing challenge of underpinning modern IT applications means that high performance SSD is becoming the norm for large parts of a data center’s IT estate, according to Thomas.

Investing in SSD technology, while guaranteeing performance on a shared platform, will help MSPs like Claranet deal with the ‘data question’ of behalf of customers, said Robert Wigger, HP’s VP for EMEA service provider business.