HP to OEM LSI Storage Virtualization Appliance

Wade Dolphin, senior Director, Global EVA R&D at HP reveals, that his company is launching a new storage virtualization appliance, named SVSP or Storage Virtualization Services Platform. At the beginning, it will support four EVA storage systems. This appliance will be used to look at the entire storage of the EVAs as a virtual resource and also for data migration. Next step will be the possibility to connect systems from other vendors. SVSP is installed between the servers and the storage devices. The new hardware and software come from LSI, up to now not a big customer of HP. It is probably based on LSI Storage SVM, a SAN solution that provides virtual volume management in heterogeneous environments, for applications such as remote mirroring, snapshot, thin provisioning and others. To our knowledge, it’s the first time LSI is becoming an HP OEM account for storage systems.

Today there are several ways to virtualize storage:

• by software like Datacore or FalconStor,
• inside a director like Brocade or EMC (Invista running on a Cisco switch),
• integrated into enterprise disk arrays like HDS,
• or finally, like LSI or IBM (SAN Volume Controller being leader in this field), using a specialized appliance containing a powerful switch and FC connections.

In all the cases, they are proprietary solutions practically without the possibility for the users to move to another vendor.