Hewlett-Packard Co. is aiming to help customers simplify and cost-optimize server virtualization with a new licensing deal.
HP will provide a free one terabyte HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) license at no cost to all purchasers of Intel Xeon processor E5 v3-based servers, including servers from Dell, IBM and Lenovo as HP’s new ProLiant Generation 9 (Gen9) Server models.
While virtualization is a hot trend in IT infrastructure, HP notes adoption remains a challenge for smaller sites due to a lack of budget, space and storage expertise at the level typically required for enterprise-class solutions. HP seeks to address this with the free licenses for software-defined storage capacity.
“The cost of shared storage is still a common server virtualization roadblock for SMBs and enterprise remote office sites,” said David Scott, senior vice-president and general manager, storage for HP, in a statement. “By offering no-cost VSA software with Intel Xeon E5 v3–based processor servers, HP and Intel are making SDS available to the world for free, giving customers access to hypervisor- agnostic, hardware-independent rich data services while preserving choice and lowering costs.”
The program will see any customer that purchases an Intel Xeon processor E5 v3-based server able to download HP StoreVirtual VSA software and obtain a license for 1TB of SDS capacity, allowing them to deploy shared storage.
HP StoreVirtual VSA software eliminates the cost of dedicated storage hardware by “tapping unused compute and storage capacity within a server to provide resilient shared storage for virtual servers running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or Linux Kernel Virtual Machine.”
To protect SDS infrastructure, HP is also offering a 60-day free trial of HP StoreOnce VSA software that gives users 10 TB of hardware-independent, software-based backup and deduplication that supports VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
