Boot-Up Camp

5:55 PM -- My, how the U.S. military has changed.

It wasn't long ago when tough-as-nails drill instructors whipped the troops into shape for combat. We hope that's still the case, but today's training apparently also includes time-tested battle tactics such as Thin Provisioning and Remote Copy.

At least, that's the way it sounds from the release 3PAR Inc. issued this week lauding its contract with the U.S. Army. (See US Army Chooses 3PAR.) Perhaps 3Par's Army implementation may give new meaning to the terms "disaster recovery" and "mission-critical," but we think the SAN vendor went a bit overboard while announcing the deal with the Army's Distributed Learning System (DLS) group.

"With 3PAR Utility Storage, we are able to provide training for U.S. Army Soldiers and units -- anytime, anywhere -- for significantly reduced physical storage cost and effort," Bob Hall, storage architect for DLS, said in the release. "3PAR enables us to achieve our training objectives by providing cost-efficient access to critical training programs that are essential to mission success."

So, just how will 3PAR help make the world safe for democracy? By letting DLS "avoid the purchase and management of SAN switching to support more than 10 high-availability (HA) hosts DLS also employs 3PAR Rapid Provisioning to save time and money by reducing workload, allowing personnel to attend to other high priority issues."The bottom line: Some lucky Army techies can spend less time battling Fibre Channel and more time in combat.

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch