Software-defined storage product line will be established

Software-defined storage, flash memory, and converged infrastructure are undoubtedly hot spots that HP advocates. Recently, Hewlett-Packard has made frequent moves on software-defined storage.

In the process of communication with the media at the end of October, Mr. Xu Runan, Product Director of China's Hewlett Packard Enterprise Group's Storage Products Division, introduced HP’s overall plan for a “software-defined data center”. According to HP’s plan, “software-defined storage” can also be used with HP Moonshot. "Software-defined servers" are combined and play an important role in the HP Helion Cloud Strategic Plan.

Xu Runan, Product Director, Storage Products Division, China Hewlett Packard Enterprise Group

And Xu Runan also revealed that HP will set up a separate product line next year, called software-defined storage, the StoreVirtual VSA and StoreOnce VSA we mentioned earlier will be integrated, and will continue to grow.

The reporter learned that HP may establish a separate software-defined storage product line by the end of this year. This will greatly benefit Hewlett-Packard's preemption of software-defined storage. The HP StoreVirtual VSA is called software-defined storage because it enables hardware and software separation, and its software can run on standard x86 servers. From this point of view, the performance of the HP StoreVirtual VSA is determined to a very large extent by the server hardware. From the current situation, software-defined storage cannot completely replace the traditional disk arrays, and they have different application scenarios. If users are simply pursuing top-level storage performance, they can choose high-end traditional disk arrays instead of having to choose software-defined storage.

Comprehensive software-defined simplicity in the cloud

Xu Runan further stated that in order to deploy software-defined storage that is easy to manage and has hardware flexibility, the HP StoreVirtual VSA supports external storage of all physical servers and accompanying management programs. It now also supports Linux kernel-based virtual machines (KVM) as well as VMware vSphere® and Windows Server with built-in Hyper-V (4). To automate cloud service management, HP StoreVirtual storage, including VSAs and physical devices, uses an updated Cinder interface to support the OpenStack architecture and a full set of RESTful APIs. These enhancements provide highly available scale-out storage for cloud computing environments and provide full-featured software-defined storage by integrating the HP StoreVirtual VSA into the HP Helion cloud portfolio.

In addition to HP Helion-based management and architecture, customers can also choose other platforms to simplify storage management for virtual servers and cloud environments. The HP OneView plug-in for VMware vCenterTM and the HP StoreFront Manager plug-in for Microsoft provide wizards for installation, configuration, and monitoring of VSA storage. VSA deployments can be completed in minutes, and users can configure 32 servers using these plug-ins in the past when configuring a server.

HP StoreVirtual storage customers, including VSAs and physical devices, can gain instant and detailed visibility into performance, capacity, and system health through the HP StoreFront Analysis Suite (vCOPS) for VMware vCenterTM Operations ManagerTM. In order to maintain high capacity utilization, HP StoreVirtual Storage supports capacity reuse in VMware and Microsoft environments. After the virtual machine and other files are deleted, unused storage space is automatically released. In order to optimize the performance of flash-based media and multi-site storage deployments, HP improved the HP StoreVirtual multi-path expansion module for VMware environments, increasing throughput by 58% and reducing network latency.

Extending and Protecting Software-Defined Storage Deployments

To meet growing business needs, HP server customers can easily and cost-effectively extend their software-defined storage deployments with new HP ProLiant Gen9 servers supporting low-cost, high-capacity HP D3000 disk enclosures with 12Gb SAS interconnects . The HP D3000 Disk Cage uses the latest host interface technology and can increase throughput by 50%, providing a modular platform for expanding server storage infrastructure. Customers can take advantage of the high-density capacity expansion provided by disk enclosures and StoreVirtual VSAs to more economically scale to over 500 terabytes of additional resiliency and shared storage capacity.

To protect the software-defined storage infrastructure, HP also offers a free trial version of the HP StoreOnce VSA software, which you can register after downloading at hp.com/go/tryVSA. During the 60-day trial period, users will receive 10TB of hardware-independent, software-based backup and deduplication, and they will support VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V VM Manager. With HP StoreOnce VSA software, users can reduce the risk of data loss and reduce data protection costs by backing up data from multiple sites to a central data center.

HP ProLiant Gen9 servers and HP D3000 disk enclosures are currently available worldwide. At present, Hewlett-Packard has also made a series of preferential activities for this release, launching the HP all-flash memory value experience journey.