The claims, the politics of offsetting and the reality… What’s the difference?

Here’s the story from 3Par’s side:

Bracknell, UK, 22nd January 2007–3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage and pioneer of Thin Provisioning, announced today the 3PAR Carbon Neutral Storage program. For every terabyte of Thin Provisioning capacity sold in 2007, 3PAR will purchase the equivalent carbon credits to offset the emissions of the disk drives required to deliver that capacity. The result for 3PAR customers is carbon neutral storage.

3PAR Thin Provisioning allows customers to support a given amount of useable capacity with a fraction of the physical storage required by traditional arrays. Organisations therefore dramatically reduce not only the cost of capacity, power, and cooling, but also the environmental costs associated with greenhouse gases. With this new program, Thin Provisioning is an even more environmentally sound choice for customers.

Thin Provisioning energy savings combined with the 3PAR 2007 Carbon Neutral Storage program effectively provides customers with their first and only choice for carbon neutral storage. In 2007, estimated offsets purchased by 3PAR will fund clean energy projects that will reduce carbon emissions generated from approximately 700 cars and 8 million pounds of CO2. 3PAR will purchase from TerraPass, the leading retailer of greenhouse gas reduction programs in the US, carbon offsets associated with the power and cooling of approximately 4 petabytes of disk capacity.

“With Thin Provisioning and the 3PAR Carbon Neutral Program, 3PAR customers not only save significant energy costs associated with power and cooling the storage environment, but they also exercise environmental responsibility,” said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. “We are excited to launch a program that promotes carbon neutral storage–reducing greenhouse gas emissions even beyond the savings that 3PAR Thin Provisioning technology produces on its own.”

For more information on the 3PAR Thin Provisioning and the Carbon Neutral Storage program, please visit: www.3par.com/green

About 3PAR

3PAR is the leading provider of Utility Storage, a simple, efficient and massively scalable tiered-storage array for utility computing that lets customers serve more with less. 3PAR Utility Storage can cut an organiSation’s Total Cost of Data by 50%. Capacity purchases and related costs can be cut by 75% while storage administration and associated expenses can be reduced by 90%. 3PAR Utility Storage is ideal for open systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management and performance-intensive applications.

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