HP has revealed its new software-defined storage system, the HP StoreVirtual 4335 HybridStorage. Aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs), the new system promises virtualisation performance at a lower cost.
The new storage appliance brings to the table HP's Adaptive Optimization technology, which allows movement between the seven 900GB SAS drives and three 400GB SSDs, data being automatically transferred seamlessly across the storage units as needed by the system. As a result, the HP system is faster than one composed of purely HDDs and lower in cost than one using only SSDs.
SSD technology adoption by SMBs has been limited traditionally by the cost and maintenance requirements. HP's StoreVirtual 4335 aims to make the most of its capabilities, maintaining close to 100 per cent utilisation of its solid state drives. In effect, the SSDs will be used for "top-tier" critical application data, the system automatically storing less important data onto more economical disk drives.
Affordable, scaleable
"As flash storage becomes pervasive, we're introducing capabilities from our enterprise storage to our SMBs," said Vish Mulchand, director of product management and marketing for HP storage. "Almost everyone is virtualising today. And with virtualisation, storage becomes the bottleneck." With sub-LUN virtualisation offered by the StoreVirtual, he added, SMBs can virtualise their environments at an affordable price.
The scale-out nature of the StoreVirtual means that customers can achieve scalable improvements as more systems are added to their infrastructure. HP hopes that this will enable SMB customers to easily scale their businesses up from smaller x86 servers to full arrays. To facilitate this, the StoreVirtual can be modified with increased storage tiers and disaster recovery.
The StoreVirtual 4335 is currently shipping at a listed price of $41,000 (£24,776 / AU$46,612).
Via BizTech2
