Thinking Virtual Storage? Introducing the new HP StoreVirtual solutions

HP have recently announced the release of the third generation Left Hand Storage with 4 major revisions:

  1. The Left Hand solutions set is being re-branded to HP StoreVirtual 4000 Storage and the SAN/iQ software to the LeftHand OS
  2. The 4130 and 4330 models are being released (the 30 denoting it as a 3rd generation model)
  3. Fibre Channel connectivity is being made available
  4. LeftHand OS 10.0 is being released

Target Audience

“SMBs and remote office environments, providing multiple hypervisors and physical deployment options, software support for all server types and high-availability across multiple locations”.

HP is obviously targeting the SMB & ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) solution sets with the new HP StoreVirtual 4130 and 4330 models.  Both are only 1U in size (basically based on HP Proliant Gen 8 technology) with support for 4 and 8 drives respectively.  They now support SFF SAS drives and SFF MDL SAS (only in the 4330).  SAS capacity has been increased to 900GB which means the 4330 has up to 4x the capacity compared to the previous P4300 G2.

Connectivity

iSCSI has been the traditional connectivity for the LeftHand Storage family, but now the 4330 model with the 900GB SAS drives will come with not only iSCSI but also FC connectivity.  This allows you to create one cluster that has both FC and iSCSI connectivity to hosts, this allows you to deploy this solution in an already established FC environment and move into an iSCSI infrastructure over time. This looks like it could be a good migration from those aging EVA’s without having to rip out the investment in SAN switches and HBA’s.

Operating System

The SAN/iQ software has not only been renamed to LeftHand OS but there’s been some major enhancements to it as well:

  • Increased Windows integration –Active Directory integration which will allow administrators to manage user authentication to HP StoreVirtual Storage via the Windows AD framework. This simplifies management by bringing SAN management under the AD umbrella. With 10.0 Windows Server 2012 OS support is also included.
  •  Improved performance –LeftHand OS version 10.0 has numerous code enhancements that will improve the performance of HP StoreVirtual systems in terms of application performance as well as storage related functions such as snapshots and replication.  The two major areas of code improvements are in multi-threading capabilities and in internal data transmission algorithms.
  • Increased Remote Copy performance – Triple the performance through optimization of the Remote Copy feature that can reduce you backup times by up to 66%.
  • Dual CPU support for VSA – In this release, the VSA software will now ship with 2 vCPUs enabled. This capability, in addition multi-threading advancements in 10.0, enhances performance up to 2x for some workloads. As a result of this enhancement, we will now also support running 2 vCPUs in older versions of VSA. HP Lab tests with SAN/iQ 9.5 and 2 vCPUs showed an up to 50% increase in performance.
  • Other performance improvements – 10.0 has been re-engineered to take advantage of today’s more powerful platforms, specifically to take better advantage of multi-core processors, and also improves the performance of volume resynchronization and restriping and merging/deleting snapshot layers

Availability

As long as you have a current support agreement in place you can go ahead and upgrade to LeftHand OS 10.0 once it’s released (early December).

The 4130 and 4330 models will also be available in early December.  So if you have an EVA that’s a bit long in the tooth, or are just looking for a versatile and robust storage solution for your HQ or remote office then please don’t’ hesitate to contact us for more information.