HP upgrades, rebrands old Lefthand Virtual SAN Appliance in cloud computing initiative

Grazed from eChannelLine. Author: Mark Cox.

HP has announced virtualization solutions aimed at enhancing the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in cloud environments. One of them, the HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) is an enhanced and rebranded version of an old LeftHand product. The others — HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect and HP Multitenant Device Context, are important firmware upgrades to HP’s FlexFabric core 12500 data center switch.

"This is a significant announcement reflecting our evolution of our converged infrastructure," said Kate Davis, product marketing manager, HP storage. The HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance is an upgrade of the old LeftHand Virtual SAN appliance, which has been on the market since 2007…

"It is the next generation of the product that we’ve been selling for the past five years," Davis said. "It is a heterogeneous platform which supports any server certified by VMware and any server qualified by Microsoft to run HyperV, and that’s unique in the market."

The VSA lets storage pools be easily built on any x86 server using VMware vSphere or Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisors to facilitate more efficient movement of data.

"We changed the name and made it more specific so that customers can better identify with what the product does," Davis said. She said it was the same philosophy as the branding of HP’s StoreOnce line, which stores data one time.

The change of the VSA name from virtual SAN to virtual storage to make it more generic was done for the same reason, Davis said.

From a channel perspective, the new VSA has expanded market opportunities, Davis added.

"The channel can add it onto any server they might be selling to a customer ," she said.

On the networking front, HP is billing the HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect (EVI) as the industry’s first solution to simplify and speed the interconnectivity of up to eight geographically dispersed data centers in minutes, eliminating manual configuration tasks.

EVI is the industry’s only Data Center Interconnect overlay technology that enables "single touch" connection of up to eight data centers around the world from one location. Clients can optimize server and storage resources to perform workload mobility or disaster recovery by linking the software in HP EVI from one data center to another.

HP Multitenant Device Context (MDC) software delivers increased security for multitenant cloud applications, eliminating the comingling of data from different applications or departments.

With HP MDC software, clients can create multiple, secure and isolated functions for organizational departments such as finance, human resources and engineering, while reducing the number of networking devices in the data center by 75%. Combining HP EVI with HP MDC simplifies data-center interconnectivity while reducing total cost of ownership by 56%) with a single management platform.

HP StoreVirtual VSA will be available worldwide in September with a starting U.S. list price of $700 per license when purchased in multilicense packs

HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect and HP Multitenant Device Context will be available worldwide this fall as software upgrades for the HP FlexFabric core switches.