Infotech Lead India: HP has announced new HP Converged Storage innovations and two software plug-ins for HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, one for use with VMware, and the other for use with SAP.
HP Converged Storage innovations are designed to enable customers to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of their virtual infrastructure by lowering costs while increasing agility and capacity utilization.
HP also announced new HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) software functionality with features such as automated sub-LUN (logical unit number) storage tiering and increased VMware and Microsoft integration to improve efficiency and performance.
The solution is designed to support the virtualized environments that range from small sites, to enterprise branch offices, and even public cloud providers. It provides them with a hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic software-defined storage to cost effectively provide high availability and other data services running on industry standard server infrastructure.
The HP StoreVirtual VSA, powered by HP LeftHand operating system, comes with new Adaptive Optimization capabilities. This, according to HP, is the industry’s first scale-out software-defined storage solution to offer data tiering.
With HP Adaptive Optimization, continuous workload monitoring helps migrate actively used data to faster storage such as solid-state disk (SSD), and inactive data to lower-cost storage such as hard disk drive (HDD) storage. This granular approach eliminates the need to move entire application volumes to more expensive SSD.
HP now offers multiple licensing options for HP StoreVirtual VSA. In addition to the 10-terabyte (TB) standard license, the company now offers a 4TB license for small sites and a 50TB high-capacity license. As a result, customers can start small and non-disruptively upgrade to a larger VSA or the HP StoreVirtual 4000 appliance as needed.
The auto-tiering capability of HP StoreVirtual VSA helps optimize the cost and performance for small or medium-sized businesses as well as remote enterprise branches, according to HP. HP StoreVirtual VSA installs three times faster and scales capacity 11 times faster than competitive software-defined storage options from VMware.
New support for VMware ParaVirtualized SCSI Controller delivers efficient CPU utilization, minimizing ongoing infrastructure investments. Increased Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V integration enables clients to provision storage from Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for faster deployment.
HP 3PAR StoreServ seamlessly integrates with solutions from leading independent software vendors (ISVs), and coupled with the new HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Manager, enables VMware administrators to efficiently and cost-effectively monitor and troubleshoot complex virtualized environments.
HP StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Manager software delivers real-time data on the health, performance and capacity utilization of the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage system. Proactive monitoring of virtualized application performance from a single management console simplifies storage management.
The new plug-in integrates HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HP XP P9500 Storage with SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management 1.0. This new HP Storage plug-in is supported in Microsoft Windows, Linux and HP-UX environments, and includes automation capabilities that reduce time to clone SAP applications.
