HP makes Software-defined Storage available to the world

HP is providing a 1-terabyte (TB) HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) license at no cost to all purchasers of Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3-based servers, including servers from Dell, IBM and Lenovo as well as new HP ProLiant Generation 9 (Gen9) Server models, which now feature single-click VSA deployment.
Virtualization continues to be the fastest-growing infrastructure trend, but adoption remains a challenge at smaller sites that lack the budget, space and storage expertise required by enterprise-class storage solutions. Service providers also struggle to achieve affordable shared storage with advanced capabilities they can then sell to their customers.

To help customers simplify and cost optimize server virtualization, HP will distribute licenses for more than 72 petabytes of software-defined storage (SDS) capacity at no additional charge to customers. Under this program, any customer that purchases an Intel Xeon processor E5 v3-based server will be able to download HP StoreVirtual VSA software and obtain a license for 1TB of SDS capacity from hp.com/go/unlockVSA. With an HP StoreVirtual VSA license, customers can easily adopt SDS by deploying resilient shared storage for less cost and physical footprint than dedicated storage hardware.

“The cost of shared storage is still a common server virtualization roadblock for SMBs and enterprise remote office sites,” said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager, Storage, HP. “By offering no-cost VSA software with Intel Xeon E5 v3–based processor servers, HP and Intel are making SDS available to the world for free, giving customers access to hypervisor- agnostic, hardware-independent rich data services while preserving choice and lowering costs.”

“Intel processors are the smart choice for a software-defined world,” said Bev Crair, General Manager, Intel’s Storage Division. “Purpose-built to support the agile, efficient data center, Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors provide the optimal platform for delivering intelligent storage while meeting compute and networking needs across the software-defined data center.”

Increased virtual desktop and online transaction processing performance
To eliminate the cost of dedicated storage hardware, HP StoreVirtual VSA software taps unused compute and storage capacity within a server to provide resilient shared storage for virtual servers running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or Linux Kernel Virtual Machine. Intel Xeon processor E5 v3-based technology provides customers with a robust, high-performance processing platform that can easily support the needs of both virtual applications and virtual storage.

Together, HP StoreVirtual VSA, standard x86 servers and the latest Intel Xeon–based processors demonstrate a 4x storage performance increase for virtual desktops and 1.8x increase with online transaction processing workloads as compared to previous-generation Intel server processor technology without additional latencies.
“Single click” SDS enables a simple path to cost-optimized server virtualization

With Intelligent Provisioning, an HP ProLiant Gen9 Server feature that now automates VSA deployment as part of server setup, HP customers can deploy SDS with only a single click. Configured in just minutes, HP ProLiant Gen9 servers running VSA software offer a complete solution that supports virtualized applications and shared storage on the same hardware for substantial cost savings.

HP StoreVirtual VSA supports all x86-based servers as well as hypervisor-attached external storage platforms, allowing organizations to transform capacity trapped in individual hardware silos into hypervisor-agnostic shared storage that can scale out to dozens of nodes and 1.6 petabytes of capacity. With this solution, customers can reduce the cost of deploying resilient shared storage by up to 80 percent and physical footprint by 50 percent as compared to deploying dedicated storage hardware.

Expand and protect SDS deployments
To meet growing business demands, HP server customers can simply and cost-effectively grow their SDS deployments with new HP ProLiant Gen9 support for low-cost, high-capacity HP D3000 Disk Enclosures with 12Gb SAS interconnects. Leveraging the latest host interface technology and providing up to 50 percent greater throughput, HP D3000 Disk Enclosures provide a modular platform for scaling server storage infrastructure.(4) Customers can take advantage of the dense capacity expansion provided by the enclosures combined with StoreVirtual VSA to cost-effectively scale to over 500TB of additional resilient, shared storage capacity.
To protect this SDS infrastructure, HP offers a free trial of HP StoreOnce VSA software downloadable upon registration at hp.com/go/tryVSA. This download provides a 60-day trial that gives users 10 TB of hardware-independent, software-based backup and deduplication that supports VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. With HP StoreOnce VSA software, users can reduce risk of data loss and lower data protection costs by backing up data from multiple sites to a central datacenter.