Data center operator and cloud services provider CloudBeam released a use study today describing the advantages it gained by upgrading its infrastructure to HP 3PAR.

CloudBeam ran its hosted CRM, collaboration and storage plans on EMC CLARiiON storage area network before the rip and replace. It wasn’t specified exactly which generation of the now discontinued product line the company used, but it falls under the legacy category nonetheless – and HP VirtualSystem proved to be a warmly welcomed substitute.

According to CloudBeam the 3PAR hardware and HP ProLiant BL460c G7 server blades increased storage throughput tenfold, while shrinking the costs associated with the storage itself by 50 percent. Administration time has been reduced by 60 percent based on the same official figures.

“Exploding data growth is forcing our customers to find cost-effective options that increase capacity while maintaining performance levels of mission-critical applications,” said Shahin Pirooz, executive vice president and chief technology officer, CloudBeam. “The functionality and scalability of HP 3PAR systems enable us to offer affordable, flexible cloud storage services to our customers, while creating a unique competitive advantage for CloudBeam in the market.”

The cloud host plans on further fleshing out its infrastructure, also joining the HP CloudAgile program. This enables it to build new solutions on top of its current infrastructure, something CloudBeam already realized in the form of a data archiving service.

Hewlett-Packard has a very broad portfolio of servers and other enterprise gear; it has certainly been heavily monetizing 3PAR, a company it acquired after winning a long and tedious bidding war against Dell. But one product in particular has been grabbing all the headlines lately: the newest member of the ProLiant family, Gen8, which features a considerable number of major innovations that make it one of the most attractive solutions on the market.