As organizations spew out an increasing amount of data they increasingly wonder where they’re going to store it all.
Hewlett-Packard Co. has announced a slew of storage announcements at once to help administrators from software-only solutions to hardware-based.
On the hardware side it announced the upcoming 3Par StoreServ 7200 All Flash Array starter kit, which the company says will bring SSD flash drive storage for budget-sensitive enterprises.
When released Sept. 29, the base array will have an expected street price of US$35,000 with eight cMLC drives giving a usable capacity of 7 TB with deduplication. It cans scale up to 690 TB, thanks to hardware-assisted thin deduplication and thin clone software.
“Customers can accelerate application performance at the low end of entry street prices,” Rob Strechay, HP’s director of software defined storage, said in an interview, at less that half the price of competitors. Those competitors include EMC’s XtremeIO with 5TB of raw capacity and Pure Storage’s FA-405 entry-level configuration with 2.75TB raw capacity.
HP says the 1U array can be used to accelerate small- to mid-size online transaction processing (OLTP)and database environments as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments with up to 500 users
The 7200 starter kit includes virtual copy snapshot and reporting software, and three-year, 24×7 support.
Other news includes:
— the StoreVirtual Virtual Appliance VSA, a software solution allowing organizations to have shared storage on their existing server and storage infrastructure, now supports the KVM hypervisor. It laready supported VMWare’s ESX and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. “This is extremely important to our service provider and enterprise customers that are focused on a cost structure that is lower and avoiding lock-in from any hypervisor” in the future, Strechay said.
StoreVirtual VSA will soon support space reclamation. which frees up unused space when administrators take down a VM and files are deleted. Support for VMware multipathing features for HP StoreVirtual Storage (including HP StoreVirtual VSA) will be broadly available in a future release of the HP LeftHand operating system. It will increases throughput at 58 per cent , which will aid in flash environments where latency is detrimental, Strechay said. It will also benefit multi-site deployments by reducing the amount of traffic across links.
HP is also adding the StoreVirtual VSA as a storage option for its Helion OpenStack and OpenStack Community Editions, to enable shared block storage on this open source orchestration platform.
–For customers using VMware vCenter or Micrsoft’s System Center Operations Manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, there are new plug-ins for storage management. The HP OneView for VMware vCenter and HP StoreFront Manager for Microsoft enable wizard-driven installation, configuration and monitoring of StoreVirtual VSA-based storage. VSA deployment can be set up in minutes, allowing users to provision 32 servers in the same time it takes to provision a single server, HP says.
HP StoreFront Manager for Microsoft plug-in will be available in a future release. HP OneView for VMware vCenter plug-in is currently available at no additional charge.
Also new is StoreVirtual support in vCenter Operations Manager for HP’s analytics pack, which provides granular visibility into performance capacity. There’s also a customizable widget for those who want to do capacity planning, and pre-defined dashboards as well. HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCOPS is available now for $200 per HP StoreVirtual management group
–HP’s StoreOnce VSA for backup now offers a 4 TB licence in addition to the original 10 TB. This smaller version, which costs US$1,400, is aimed departments or branches that need a small footprint — for example as part of a virtualized server for local storage, and later replication to the data centre. It could also appeal to service providers who want to offer backup as a service, letting them start small and buy more capacity or upgrade to a hardware appliance later.
It also now supports Hyper-V, so organizations can have multi-hypervisor environments. StoreOnce VSA now also supports some of StoreOnce Security Packs which offers encryption and secure erase of data.
