3PAR, global provider of utility storage, announced that Tickets.com, a leading provider of fully integrated event ticketing services for thousands of top arts, entertainment, and sports organisations worldwide, has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage as the foundation for its signature ProVenue ticketing platform.

The decision to deploy highly virtualised 3PAR Utility Storage has enabled Tickets.com to improve management efficiency by 10x and reduce the time to deployment window by 88% as compared to traditional storage arrays. The event ticketing vendor has also reported up-front cost savings with 3PAR that total more than half a million dollars as compared to traditional arrays from other vendors.

“Other storage vendors simply couldn’t offer us the cost advantages, functionality, scalability, and ease of management that 3PAR did,” said Brett Michalak, Chief Information Officer for Tickets.com. “With 3PAR, all the advanced features we needed were integrated into the system and provided at a cost well below that of the alternatives, and we didn’t need a dedicated SAN team or any additional people to manage it. With 3PAR, our systems were up and we were provisioning storage to our database servers within a day. That’s unheard of with other platforms,” said Michalak.

Powered by hyper-efficient and highly virtualised 3PAR InServ Storage Servers and Oracle Database Servers, the launch of SaaS-based ProVenue, the newest and most advanced ticketing system from Tickets.com, puts clients in control of their ticketing operation—from box office to phone sales to Internet transactions. With unsurpassed flexibility, open architecture, robust data management tools, and transaction speed, ProVenue delivers industry-leading technology to ticketing.

Through utilising advanced 3PAR software offerings such as 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR System Reporter, Tickets.com has reduced storage costs by maintaining a virtualised environment that enables them to do more with less—fewer disks, less power, less administration time—which has saved the company over a half a million dollars in up-front costs. The decision to build the ProVenue platform on top of a 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure has also given Tickets.com the flexibility to add new customers and services rapidly—decreasing the time to deployment window by 88%. The reliability and flexibility of the 3PAR Utility Storage platform are supplemented by robust monitoring tools that enable Tickets.com to automatically screen the health of their systems to ensure the best end-user experience for clients and their customers.

In addition, 3PAR Dynamic Optimisation makes the event ticketing vendor’s 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure much easier to manage than traditional arrays, which has allowed Tickets.com to avoid adding headcount to administer their storage infrastructure. 3PAR Utility Storage has also enabled storage costs to remain low through a pay-as-you-grow architecture that has helped the ticketing vendor maintain storage spend that is in line with sales growth.

“As exemplified by Tickets.com with its ProVenue platform, many companies are looking to add some level of SaaS or cloud-based applications to their existing offerings in order to generate new revenue and improve their reach,” said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “3PAR Utility Storage is extremely well-suited to providers looking to test these waters. With 3PAR, they can ‘dip their toes into the SaaS pool’ with minimal up-front investment then scale their storage infrastructure simply and painlessly once their new services gain traction and start to generate revenue.”

“The story that Tickets.com tells is one we hear time and time again,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Their traditional storage infrastructure was holding them back. It simply wasn’t designed for innovation. It was inflexible, complex to manage, and at the end of the day extremely expensive. Lean times call for smart storage, and 3PAR was able to deliver more for less—more automation, more advanced capabilities, more capacity headroom, and better visibility—for dramatically lower cost and administrative effort.”