Data storage not only has become commoditized; it’s now being used as live bait in order to sell hardware.
Hewlett-Packard, whose storage business remains one of the most successful across its entire product line, revealed Sept. 23 that it will now provide a 1TB virtual storage appliance license free of charge to all purchasers of Intel Xeon-based E5 v3-based servers. This software-defined storage offer also will apply to HP’s new ProLiant Generation 9 servers.
An unusual aspect to this is that HP and Intel will throw in this inducement when customers buy servers from HP’s competitors that also use Xeon chips—Dell, IBM and Lenovo. This is clear acknowledgement of the general mix-and-match reality of the data center, with certain brands and types of servers and storage matched to various workloads.
A terabyte is a non-trivial amount of capacity, although terabytes of capacity fill up a lot faster than in the past, thanks to the ever-increasing amount of content flowing into enterprise systems from mobile and machine-data devices.
HP StoreVirtual benefits include:
—Increased virtual desktop and online transaction processing performance: Intel Xeon E5 v3-based technology easily supports virtual appliances and virtual storage, while HP StoreVirtual VSA software uses previously unused compute and storage capacity within a server, providing resilient shared storage for virtual servers running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux Kernel Virtual Machine.
—Single-click SDS deployment: ProLiant Gen9 servers feature a single-click, wizard-based SDS deployment that automates VSA deployment as part of server setup. HP ProLiant Gen9 servers running VSA software offer a complete package that supports virtualized applications and shared storage on the same hardware. HP Virtual Solution software supports all x86-based servers and hypervisor-attached external storage platforms.
—Expands and protects SDS deployments: Users who combine the VSA with HP D3000 Disk enclosures can cost effectively scale to over 500TB of additional shared storage capacity. HP offers a 60-day free trial of its StoreOnce VSA backup software to protect this SDS infrastructure.
Pricing of HP ProLiant Gen9 Servers varies, based on model and customer configurations. HP D3000 Disk Enclosures start at $3,738.