3PAR, a provider of utility storage, recently announced 3PAR InServ Storage Server support for IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing for AIX (HACMP). HACMP customers can now deploy 3PARs Utility Storage, to complement their mission-critical AIX environments.

"IBM HACMP technology brings customers peace of mind with superior planned and unplanned downtime protection," said Jeffrey Howard, IBM’s Director of System p5 Offering Management. "Now with 3PAR support for HACMP clusters, high availability AIX customers have access to the benefits of IBM HACMP technology and 3PAR Utility Storage."

Enterprises often deploy high availability cluster technologies such as HACMP in conjunction with highly available, high-end storage systems. However, even though these storage systems can offer high levels of storage performance, scalability and high availability, they are costly to implement and can be complex to administer. As an alternative, enterprises may opt for more affordable dual-controller, midrange storage but in doing so they compromise availability and face increased downtime risk.

3PAR claims that its Utility Storage resolves this dilemma by offering a highly available, massively scalable, clustered architecture that delivers high and predictable levels of performance for dramatically less cost than high-end arrays. This includes robust remote replication capabilities, via 3PAR Remote Copy, for disaster recovery of AIX environments. Additionally, 3PAR Multipath I/O (MPIO) for IBM AIX provides simple and efficient path failover and recovery for high availability environments.

3PAR InServ Storage Server support for IBM HACMP technology is currently available with IBM System p5 servers.