Yawn...
How about telling some of the features of this "great" give away.. cause at the moment I see nothing to differentiate this from the other 50+ VSANs that are available..
HP is spreading the virtual SAN idea for small and medium biz by including one at no cost with Gen 8 ProLiant server buys. Its StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) turns server’s direct-attached storage into a virtual storage area network (SAN) and is regarded as software-defined storage since it’s sold without storage …
Just read the specs on the HP VSA. Seems a much more capable VSAN than any of the others I've seen - auto-tiering (with flash and hard disks), replication (synch/asynch), snapshots, thin provisioning, runs in Hyper-V or VMware environments and integrated/certified with their management systems, scales out through clustering.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13255_div/13255_div.pdf
May get a lot of traction with small businesses who can get their enterprise storage on the cheap rather than buying EMC or NetApp. Bet you resellers will love the upsell opportunities...
...for the SMB space, especially considering you can buy a couple high horsepower Proliant servers with a bunch of NIC ports and some VMware Essentials licensing or Windows Server Datacenter, and share the built-in storage with all of the systems in the cluster. Good case to get some Procurve switches on heavy discount, too.
Create a small local datastore for the VSA, give it the rest of the disks in the system to share, cluster it with VSAs on the other nodes using the network RAID functionality, and enjoy the recent improvements to the tech.
I've tried it before in a lab environment and came away pretty impressed. It's really easy to use and works well. The real LeftHand stuff, especially 10GbE with fast drives, is very nifty (per-node expansion costs are a bit high though compared to adding a RAID pack or something like that but you do save a bit on software licensing).
Apparently you can upgrade non disruptively from the initial 1TB to 4TB's, 10TB's or 50TB's. It's aimed at remote offices with a couple of physical servers running the whole infrastructure in a hypervisor. Put some cheap disk in those servers and with the VSA you also now have shared storage with plenty of features (tiering, snapshots, replication, thin provisioning etc)
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Storage-Blog/Unlocking-the-promise-of-ProLiant-with-Software-Defined-Storage/ba-p/149635