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Leading Global Provider of Utility Storage Commemorates 10th Anniversary

3PAR^® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that this month marks the company’s 10th anniversary. After beginning operations in May of 1999, the company went on to commercially launch its highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage platform and proprietary 3PAR Thin Provisioning software in 2002. These innovations have since earned the utility storage provider a reputation as a thin and green technology pioneer. Last year, 3PAR followed on its thin technology innovations with the introduction of the 3PAR InServ^® T-Class Storage Server, which established 3PAR as the first storage vendor to commercially ship an efficient "fat-to-thin" volume conversion mechanism into storage array hardware.

“With the administrative simplicity of their utility storage platform and pioneering introduction of thin provisioning within open-systems storage arrays, 3PAR brought to market a business model that has changed the cost structure of storage by giving its customers the flexibility to grow as they go,” said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst of Taneja Group. “This paved the way for new Hardware- and Software-as-a-Service offerings, Web 2.0 innovation, and cloud computing deployments that have enabled enterprise and service provider customers to lower CAPEX and OPEX, align costs more tightly with business growth, and capture new revenue streams that otherwise would not have been possible.”

According to a survey published by TheInfoPro in their Wave 11 storage study, 3PAR InServ S-800 and E-200 arrays rank number one in exciting vendor products in use by large and midsize enterprises. Findings published by TheInfoPro have also identified the InServ storage server as a leading alternative to EMC within Fortune 1000 enterprises. Over the past decade, 3PAR has become a leader in providing utility storage systems to the hosting and enterprise cloud computing markets and is currently the preferred utility storage vendor to 7 of the world’s top 10 revenue-generating managed service providers, as determined by the Winter 2009 Managed Hosting Report issued by Tier1 Research, an independent technology industry analyst. In addition, the company has continually achieved high marks from its customers for green storage initiatives, most recently in a TechValidate survey of 3PAR customers where 95% of the respondents recommended using 3PAR Utility Storage as a strategic component of any Green IT initiative.

“Over the past decade we have brought to market pioneering proprietary technologies that we believe have had transformational effects on the datacenter,” said Ashok Singhal, 3PAR Founder and Chief Technical Officer, System Architecture. “When we introduced our utility storage platform in 2002, we were among the first in the industry to bring storage virtualization and green storage technologies to market. A decade later, storage vendors throughout the industry have incorporated virtualization and green computing technologies into their offerings.”

3PAR’s customers are primarily organizations for whom serving information is mission-critical, including cloud computing service providers (for example, Managed Service Providers and Hardware- and Software-as-a-Service providers) and internal service bureaus (for example, IT organizations within enterprises and government agencies). Both groups benefit from delivering solutions based on a utility service model that leverages a cost-effective, shared, virtualized infrastructure for workload consolidation and flexible resource allocation.

3PAR was founded by engineers from Sun Microsystems to address the emergence of a new IT architectural approach called utility computing. 3PAR was a privately held company until its initial public offering in November of 2007. Shares of the company’s common stock were initially traded on the NYSE Arca, a trading platform of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), before the company transferred the listing of its shares to the NYSE’s main platform, commonly known as the “Big Board,” in December of 2008.

Since its inception, the company has established four subsidiaries in the US, Europe, and Asia and has grown to $184.7 million in revenue in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009. Today, 3PAR has its headquarters in Fremont, California, as well as a research and development facility in Belfast, Ireland. The company also has direct sales personnel located in the United States, the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, and Japan, and direct customer service personnel in the United States and the UK. The utility storage company was recently named by the San Jose Mercury News as the seventh fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley based on sales.

“We have not only spent the last decade establishing ourselves as a storage virtualization pioneer, but we have continued to deliver on our promise of making storage systems simple and efficient,” said David Scott, 3PAR President and Chief Executive Officer. “We believe this is the reason we have been able to quickly penetrate the market for today’s most demanding cloud computing deployments. As a pioneer in storage technologies, we intend to continue innovating to extend our technology leadership position in the industry.”