HP helps software-defined storage customers maximize server investments with Data Tiering

HP announced new HP Converged Storage innovations that enable customers to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of their virtual infrastructure by lowering costs while increasing agility and capacity utilization.

Extending its six-year leadership in software-defined storage, HP announced new HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA)software functionality. These new features includeautomated sub-LUN (logical unit number) 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 introducedtwo software plug-ins for HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, one for use with VMware, and the other for use with SAP®.These plug-ins help customers simplify management of complex application deployments.

Autonomic, scalable and highly available 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 high availability and other data services running on industrystandard server infrastructure.

HP StoreVirtual VSA powered by the proven HP LeftHandoperating system and introducingnewAdaptive Optimization capabilities is the industry’s first 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 improvedefficiency and performance.

With HP Adaptive Optimization, continuous workload monitoringmigratesactively used data to faster storage such assolid-state disk (SSD), and inactive data to lower-cost storage such as hard disk drive (HDD) storage. This granularapproach eliminates the need to move entire application volumes to more expensive SSD. For inactive data, HP StoreVirtual VSA enables customers to further reduce costs byrepurposing and virtualizing their legacy third-party storage, treating that capacity as a secondary tier within HP Adaptive Optimization.

HP now offersmultiple licensing options for HP StoreVirtual VSA, providing flexibility to support current workloads as well as futuregrowth requirements. 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 nondisruptively upgrade to a larger VSA or the HP StoreVirtual 4000 appliance as needed.

Easily managed by IT generalists in VMware and Microsoft environments, HP StoreVirtual VSA installsthree times faster and scales capacity 11times faster than competitive software-defined storage options fromVMware.⁽³⁾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.

“To reduce datacenter investment and operational costs, budget-conscious organizations are transitioning from dedicated physical hardware to software-defined storage embedded on existing industry standard servers,” said Walid Gomaa, Business Unit and Sales Manager, HP Storage Division, HP Middle East. “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-defineddatacentersrequires Open API and application-integrated control of storage systems to ensureadministrative productivity.

HP 3PAR StoreServ seamlessly integrates with solutions fromleading 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 Managersoftware 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 simplifiesstorage management. To facilitate the decision process, the software provides accurate capacity and forecasting data regarding HP 3PAR StoreServ storage services,including hardware-accelerated thin provisioning, which greatly increases storage capacity efficiency without impacting application performance.

For managinglarge and complex SAP deployments in physical and virtualized environments, HPnow offers a plug-in that integratesHP 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 thatreduce time to cloneSAP applications. These automation capabilities in turn help reduce the overall system copy and refresh time, whichimprovesbusiness agility while reducing risks associated with manual provisioning.