HP drives rapid virtualization ROI for SMBs

HP has announced HP StoreVirtual 4335 Storage, a new software-defined storage system for Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) to enable high virtualized application performance while reducing costs by dynamically moving data between solid state and traditional disk drives.

HP StoreVirtual 4335 Storage is a hybrid storage system which offers a unique Adaptive Optimization feature that automates the intelligent movement of frequently accessed data from hard disk drives (HDDs) to high-performance solid state drives (SSDs). This auto-tiering capability accelerates application performance compared to HDDs, and delivers 59 percent lower cost than using SSDs alone. As a result, SMB customers spend less on storage while supporting more virtual machines.

“Workloads in virtual server environments can be unpredictable and are heavily dependent on the underlying storage for performance. This creates challenges in meeting service levels—particularly for companies looking to virtualize more of their applications, implementing desktop virtualization, or simply experiencing rapid virtualized application growth,” said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager, Storage, HP. “The StoreVirtual 4335 gives our SMB customers a way to break through their performance challenge and drive greater server virtualization performance at lower costs.”

Balancing performance and cost to make the most out of SSD capacity
Solid state and flash media allow customers to achieve performance levels that eliminate the roadblocks to virtualization performance. However, affordability has traditionally limited SMB adoption of SSD technology.

HP StoreVirtual 4335 Hybrid Storage is a purpose-built system designed to accelerate workloads affordably. The Adaptive Optimization feature in the StoreVirtual 4335 is an auto-tiering capability that provides cost effective use of valuable SSD capacity. HP StoreVirtual Adaptive Optimization transparently monitors data access patterns at 256KB granularity and then moves only the data that has high access patterns to SSD storage. In this way SSD capacity can be utilized efficiently, allowing SMB customers to get the benefits of server virtualization performance acceleration without a high price tag.

HP StoreVirtual Adaptive Optimization software maintains nearly 100 percent utilization of SSDs, making it ideal for businesses that need affordable, high-performance storage. It also increases SSD efficiency by allocating top tier capacity for business critical application data and storing replicated (RAID 10, RAID 10+1) or parity data (RAID 5 and 6) on more economical SAS disks.

Software-defined storage leadership from pure software to turnkey systems
All HP StoreVirtual solutions utilize a common operating system across appliance offerings as well as virtual storage appliance offerings. The HP StoreVirtual feature set delivers the benefits of advanced data services like adaptive optimization, multi-site high availability and thin provisioning for one low, all-inclusive price.

The StoreVirtual 4335 with Adaptive Optimization is the latest addition to HP’s leading software-defined storage portfolio, based on version 11.0 of the highly portable HP LeftHand Operating System (OS). HP StoreVirtual Storage offers customers a choice of HP ProLiant rack- and blade-based hardware models, or a wide range of StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) including a free 1TB StoreVirtual VSA which HP includes with the purchase of eligible HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers.

The scale-out nature of the solution means customers can achieve near linear improvements in performance each time a system is added. This enables SMB customers to meet rapidly changing performance and capacity requirements by growing flexibly and non-disruptively from a low or no-cost VSA which runs on any x86 server to a clustered configuration of multiple StoreVirtual 4335 Hybrid Arrays that delivers resilient shared storage capable of faster processing. In addition, customers can easily add storage tiers or configure disaster recovery between physical and virtual storage appliances.

The latest version of the HP LeftHand OS also includes integration with Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager via SMI-S and VMware vCenter Server™ via the HP Insight Control plug-in. These integrations enable storage provisioning at the same time virtual machines are defined to streamline workflow and speed deployment.