HP Converged Storage Innovations in Data Tiering

Hewlett-Packard Development company, L.P. announced converged storage innovations that enable customers to maximize the ROI of their virtual infrastructure by lowering costs while increasing agility and capacity utilization.

Extending its six-year leadership in software-defined storage (based on company’s internal comparative analysis of publicly available data from major competitors, August 2013), HP announced StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance  (VSA) software functionality. These new features include automated sub-LUN storage tiering and increased VMware and Microsoft integration to improve efficiency and performance. New licensing options provide deployment flexibility to support current workload requirements and future growth needs.

HP also introduced two software plug-ins for 3PAR StoreServ Storage, one for use with VMware, and the other for use with SAP software. These plug-ins help customers simplify management of complex application deployments.

Autonomic, scalable and HA software-defined storage
Organizations with virtualized environments that range from small sites, to enterprise branch offices, and even public cloud providers, are turning to hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic software-defined storage to cost-effectively provide HA and other data services running on industry standard server infrastructure.

StoreVirtual VSA – powered by LeftHand OS and introducing new Adaptive Optimization capabilities – is a scale-out software-defined storage solution to offer data tiering. This feature moves data blocks to high-performance or cost-optimized storage automatically, based on application needs, for improved efficiency and performance.(Taneja Group blog, Defining Software-defined… Storage)

With Adaptive Optimization, continuous workload monitoring migrates actively used data to faster storage such as SSD, and inactive data to lower-cost storage such as HDD. This granular approach eliminates the need to move entire application volumes to more expensive SSD. For inactive data, StoreVirtual VSA enables customers to reduce costs by repurposing and virtualizing their legacy third-party storage, treating that capacity as a secondary tier within Adaptive Optimization.

HP now offers multiple licensing options for StoreVirtual VSA, providing flexibility to support current workloads as well as future growth requirements. In addition to the 10TB standard license, the company now offers a 4TB license for small sites and a 50TB license. As a result, customers can start small and nondisruptively upgrade to a larger VSA or the StoreVirtual 4000 appliance as needed.

Easily managed by IT generalists in VMware and Microsoft environments, StoreVirtual VSA installs three times faster and scales capacity 11 times faster than competitive software-defined storage options from VMware.(Taneja Group, Whitepaper – HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance: The VSA for scalable VM density. A test lab validation of StoreVirtual VSA and vSphere Storage Appliance, August 2013.) New support for VMware ParaVirtualized SCSI Controller delivers efficient CPU utilization, minimizing ongoing infrastructure investments. Increased Windows Server with Hyper-V integration enables clients to provision storage from Microsoft System Center VM Manager for faster deployment.

"To reduce data center investment and operational costs, budget-conscious organizations are transitioning from dedicated physical hardware to software-defined storage embedded on existing industry standard servers," said David Scott, SVP and GM, storage, HP. "Having pioneered software-defined storage with an installed base of over 170,000 StoreVirtual VSA licenses, HP is now extending its leadership in this area with auto-tiering capability to further optimize cost and performance for small or medium-sized businesses as well as remote enterprise branches."

Simplified storage management and orchestration
Transitioning to software-defined data centers requires open API and application-integrated control of storage systems to ensure administrative productivity.

3PAR StoreServ integrates with solutions from ISVs, and coupled with the new StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Manager, enables VMware administrators to efficiently and cost-effectively monitor and troubleshoot complex virtualized environments.

StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Manager software delivers real-time data on the health, performance and capacity utilization of the3PAR StoreServ Storage system. Proactive monitoring of virtualized application performance from a single management console simplifies storage management. To facilitate the decision process, the software provides accurate capacity and forecasting data regarding 3PAR StoreServ storage services, including hardware-accelerated thin provisioning, which increases storage capacity efficiency without impacting application performance.

For managing large and complex SAP deployments in physical and virtualized environments, HP now offers a plug-in that integrates 3PAR StoreServ Storage and XP P9500 Storage with SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management 1.0. This new plug-in is supported in Windows, Linux and HP-UX environments, and includes automation capabilities that reduce time to clone SAP applications. These automation capabilities in turn help reduce the overall system copy and refresh time, which improves business agility while reducing risks associated with manual provisioning.

Pricing and availability

• StoreVirtual VSA will be available Sept. 30 at multiple capacity points. A three pack of 4TB licenses will be priced at or below $3,000.
• StoreFront Analytics Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Manager will be available later this year for $7,500 for up to 10 HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage systems.
• Storage plug-in for SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management is available for download since Aug. 19 at no charge for HP customers with an active support contract for HP storage systems.

All three new solutions will be available globally from HP and authorized channel partners.