3PAR Customer Hilton Grand Vacations Wins Computerworld Award for Virtual Datacenter Deployment

Market Wire, October, 2008

3PAR ® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage , announced today that 3PAR customer Hilton Grand Vacations was chosen by Storage Networking World (SNW), in conjunction with IDG's Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), to receive the award for "ROI and Best Practices in Green Computing and the Data Center." Storage Networking World's "Best Practices in Storage" Awards Program identifies and acknowledges excellence among users of storage technology. Hilton Grand Vacations' storage infrastructure -- built on highly virtualized and energy-efficient 3PAR Utility Storage -- was singled out for having achieved a standard of excellence in sustainable technology that provides a model for the industry. Since 2007, 3PAR has helped customers like Hilton Grand Vacations achieve a total estimated reduction in CO2 emissions of more than 20,000 metric tons -- the equivalent of removing nearly 4,000 cars from the road for an entire year.

"Data and storage networking initiatives are one of the most important pillars of the IT infrastructure," said Ron Milton, executive Vice President of Computerworld. "The organizations and professionals recognized by Storage Networking World's Fall 2008 'ROI and Best Practices in Green Computing and the Data Center' award have unlocked the true value of green IT and its strategic importance to their businesses."

As the timeshare division of leading global hospitality company Hilton Hotels Corporation, Hilton Grand Vacations develops, markets, and operates a system of brand-name, high-quality vacation ownership resorts in select vacation destinations. Last year, this 3PAR customer embarked on a worldwide datacenter virtualization strategy to address the company's growth and the resulting "server sprawl" that was weighing down operations. In addition to selecting multiple 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers to be dispersed geographically, the company implemented a complete virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint . "3cV" stands for the combination of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, HP BladeSystem c-Class, and VMware® Infrastructure.

"We view this project as having several key benefits -- hard cost savings, enhancement of our business continuity capabilities, and most of all it supports our corporate sustainability objectives," said Rich Jackson, Vice President of Technology Operations at Hilton Grand Vacations. "We chose to work with 3PAR in part because they have been a strategic partner and have helped us to find innovative answers to our problems including helping us meet our green IT objectives," said Jackson.

Hilton Grand Vacations' datacenter is now 50 to 60% smaller, which has saved the company up to 60% on the cost of power, cooling, and housing their equipment and enabled them to meet their green IT objectives. With their new virtualized infrastructure built on 3PAR and 3cV, Hilton Grand Vacations has also reduced storage management time by 75%, increased storage administrative efficiency by 4x, and decreased server and storage provisioning time by 90%.

"We see the cost savings of our virtualized datacenter as just one reward for replacing legacy equipment with more efficient, sustainable technologies," said Jackson. "With 3PAR Utility Storage, we have increased our efficiency and built an agile and resilient infrastructure, but we have also reduced our carbon footprint by an estimated 60%."

"As a long-time member of SNIA, SNW's 'Best Practices in Storage' award given to Hilton Grand Vacations holds special significance for us," said David Scott, CEO and President of 3PAR. "3PAR's highly-virtualized, utility-based approach to green storage is designed to integrate with server virtualization technologies to provide an alternative for customers who want to build a complete utility computing infrastructure. We are extremely excited to have helped Hilton Grand Vacations reduce the energy and carbon footprint of their datacenter so dramatically and to see them recognized for excellence in this area," said Scott.

The award given to Hilton Grand Vacations was announced during an awards ceremony at Storage Networking World Fall 2008 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Conference Center in Grapevine, Texas, on October 15, 2008.

About Hilton Grand Vacations

Hilton Grand Vacations Company, LLC, is a division of Hilton Hotels Corporation, recognized as the leading global hospitality company. Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, Hilton Grand Vacations develops, markets, and operates a system of brand-name, high-quality vacation ownership resorts in select vacation destinations. The company also manages and operates two innovative club membership programs: Hilton Grand Vacations Club® and The Hilton Club®, providing exclusive exchange, leisure travel, and reservation services for more than 137,000 Club members.

About Computerworld

Computerworld is recognized worldwide as the premier source for news, information and opinion on the critical technology and management issues affecting senior technology professionals. Computerworld's award-winning weekly publication, Computerworld.com Web site, focused conference series, and custom research, form the hub of the world's largest (58-edition) global IT media network. In the past five years alone, Computerworld has won more than 100 awards, including the 2004 and 2006 Magazine of the Year Award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Computerworld has an online audience of over 1.1 million unique monthly visitors (Omniture) and a total print audience of 1,337,000 (IntelliQuest CIMS Spring 2006). Computerworld is on the Web at www.computerworld.com .