HP today took the lid off new enhancements to the company’s storage software and a new “starter” 3PAR StoreServ all-flash array.
The products, said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing for HP Storage, are “aimed at folks who are thinking about storage for the software-defined data center.” As such, HP is extending support to open source computing and cloud standards that are reshaping the IT facilities of enterprises and cloud service providers.
HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), the company’s virtual SAN product that hails from the company’s acquisition of Left Hand Networks in 2008, is branching out beyond VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. “We expanded its hypervisor support to KVM,” Nunes told InfoStor.
KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtualization Machine, helps HP not only tick a box off StoreVirtual VSA’s features list, it provides “a better cost structure, a nice affinity with open source and OpenStack,” said Nunes.
Webopedia’s entry for KVM observes:
“KVM has been directly integrated into the Linux kernel as of 2007’s 2.6.20 Linux kernel release. KVM is the basis for both IBM’s and Red Hat’s Linux virtualization technologies, and it’s also the most widely used virtualization technology in the OpenStack cloud.”
HP StoreVirtual VSA “promises to handle some of the lock-in concerns some have with the other hypervisors,” added Nunes. “It now covers the top three hypervisors in the market.”
Key to the software-defined data center are software data services that are independent of the infrastructure, asserted Nunes. “We want to make sure that independence includes the huypervisor as well,” he said. “We don’t want people to make that trade-off.”
In addition, HP “updated the Cinder driver for StoreVirtual to the latest Icehouse-based [release],” enabling cloud storage orchestration and automated management, he said. Cinder is a block storage services component or OpenStack.
On the data protections front, the company rolled out a 4 TB version ($1,400) of StoreOnce VSA, HP’s virtual backup appliance, that “further reduces the cost at the edge,” said Nunes. Previously, the product started at 10 TB. In a nod to service providers, HP is making StoreOnce VSA “available a reference architecture for a cloud-backup-architecture-as-a-service.”
HP also unveiled its 3PAR StoreServ 7200 All-Flash Starter Kit. The array, available on Sept. 29 with a starting price of $35,000, scales from 7 TB to 690 TB of usable flash capacity courtesy of 3PAR deduplication and Thin Clones software.