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back to article HP is giving away FREE* STORAGE to lucky server customers

HP is giving away a one terabyte software SAN licence to every Xeon E5 v3-based server buyer, whether they buy Dell, HP, IBM or Lenovo servers. The software is the StoreVirtual VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance), the old LeftHand iSCSI SAN software technology. It turns a server’s own direct-attached storage into a networked, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NSA data tap

    i guess NSA figured how to deploy another remote data tap vector.. offer it free via HP to unsuspecting schmucks that have xeons...

    does HP have a warrant canary posted somewhere? can we check if it's still alive? HP probably got one of those hush-hush letters telling them to do this or they start losing a few fingers a day.

    0 4 Reply
  2. James 29

    Small

    1TB is pretty small fry these days, wouldn't even store my data at home, rather than a customers site. Its basically a way to get people interested to upsell the full product - although the HP VSA is a cool thing.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Danny 14
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      Re: Small

      indeed, if you are enticed by 1TB and free is all you are willing to pay then install openfiler and run iscsi instead.

      3 2 Reply
    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
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      Go

      Re: James 29 Re: Small

      "1TB is pretty small fry these days, wouldn't even store my data at home...." It's enough for learning with, maybe enough for creating a mirrored cluster for your MP3s, but not enough for a business to put in production. My experience is VSA clusters tend to grow and grow because they are cheap and easy to use, a bit like the old NetApp farms.

      The devil is in the detail for a home cluster - you either need a whole server for each instance or a VM. Inside each node you RAID across a set of 'disks' (real or vdisks), so you really need four each per instance (you can do it with three per node but utilization is low). If you then want to do RAID10 (mirroring of vLUNs across nodes in a cluster) then you need two instances, but most people also want to play with replication between clusters so you then need two clusters of two instances (you can make single instances with RAID0 but then you have no redundancy and risk data loss). If you want to play with RAID50 then it's four or more nodes (best) per cluster. So, to build a home cluster requires quite a bit of kit and/or a lot of virtualization.

      0 1 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        But do you really need a multi node HA setup with NR10 ontop of HW raid 5 for a home setup ? I would have thought even for basic functional testing in a home lab you could get sway within couple of nodes either in a cluster for HA or a single node in each cluster with async replication. Depends what you need to test. If you want to scale this up then your likely not playing at home and so will want a support package, in which case you'll want to upgrade to one of the higher capacity versions.

        Upgrades for HA comfugurations are non disruptive and as.an added bonus non destructive also ;-)

        1 0 Reply
  3. Jim McDonald

    small, but useful

    'valid for 1095 days' in addition to being limited to 1TB.

    Might come in handy for Dev/Testing work though.

    5 0 Reply

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