Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Recently, HP has released a number of updates to products within its Converged Infrastructure Solutions Group. The most notable improvement is the updated HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), which HP plans to deploy to both SMBs and public cloud providers starting in September.

The updated VSA enables customers to build storage pools using VMware or Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V hypervisors on virtually any x86 server. The simultaneous support for both VMware and Hyper-V means that users can build out and manage their data across multiple heterogeneous servers and hypervisors. With this capability, the VSA is largely hardware and software independent.

The benefits that SMBs realize from deploying virtualized appliances are well-documented and include:  centralized management of branches, simplified configuration and lower capital expenditures. Public cloud providers can also potentially reduce the number of machines that they will require in the data center, which means big savings on energy costs.

While customers may not have heard of VSA before, the system is simply built upon HP’s LeftHand storage area network (SAN) code that has been virtualized to guarantee easy deployment. Companies can deploy the solution with acquiring additional SAN hardware, which means increasing its capabilities without purchasing expensive equipment.

To use the VSA, enterprises need VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V servers that contain three reserved gigabytes of RAM (News - Alert) and one virtual CPU with two GHz reserved. Additionally, virtual disks need five GB to 2 TB of storage space with up to 10 TB total for each virtual storage appliance. A dedicated Gigabit virtual switch completes the system requirements for the VSA.

Customers can try a 60-day free trial of HP StoreVirtual VSA before committing to purchasing licenses. Each license comes with three years of support services.

In addition to the VSA, HP also revamped its HP Virtual Ethernet Interconnect (EVI) and the HP Multitenant Device Context (MDC). Both will be available this fall as software upgrades for HP FlexFabric core switches.

HP EVI proposes to interconnect up to eight data centers in minutes, simplifying disaster recovery as well as everyday resource allocation. With HP MDC, companies can increase data protection by using the solution to silo off data from sensitive applications and departments.

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