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back to article Here comes the SAN: HP gives away virtual one

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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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..

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    1. yoda's bitch
      Reply Icon

      Re: Yawn...

      http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13255_div/13255_div.pdf

      There you go.

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  2. Jeff 11

    "Up to 1TB of storage"!?

    Perhaps the story should be "HP gives away virtual SAN trialware"?

    ...Or perhaps it's not much of a story at all.

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  3. R8it

    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...

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  4. M. B.

    It's pretty cool...

    ...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).

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    1. Craig Foster
      Reply Icon

      Re: It's pretty cool...

      If you can afford 10GbE infrastructure, why play with freeware?

      That said, 1TB storage is woeful. Make it properly free like the other 1 & 1TB VSAN "trialware" products and let us judge for ourselves.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's pretty cool...

        Larger trial versions of StoreVirtual SAN & StoreOnce Dedupe VSA's available here:-

        http://www.hp.con/go/tryvsa

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  5. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Go

    Hp's VSA - like smack!

    Yeah, it's good, and cheaper than traditional arrays like hp's own 3PARs, but 1TB? Hp's resellers will be like smack dealers on street corners - "The first hit is free....."

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hp's VSA - like smack!

      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

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  6. A n o n y m o u s

    This link seems to have more details:

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/data-storage/free-vsa.html

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