HP Offers Free Software-Defined Storage to Server Buyers

HP and Intel have partnered on an incentive program to give away a 1 terabyte HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) license at no cost to all purchasers of servers powered by Intel’s latest Xeon E5 v3 processors.

Looking to push adoption of software-defined storage HP will distribute licenses for more than 72 petabytes of capacity and give customers the ability to download HP StoreVirtual VSA software and obtain a license for 1TB of 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 of storage at HP. “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.”

HP says its StoreVirtual VSA software taps 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. With the release of its Gen9 servers HP adds automated VSA deployment as well, with a single-click configuration for a solution supporting virtualized applications and shared storage.

VSA can scale out to dozens of nodes and 1.6 petabytes of capacity, the company said.

HP is also offering a free trial of its StoreOnce VSA software for 10TB of hardware-independent, software-based backup and deduplication.