HPE entered the SDS/HCI market with their acquisition of LeftHand Networks halfway through 2008.
LeftHand Networks, founded in 1999, is a noticeable name as the company pioneered iSCSI storage and eventually ventured into software-based SANs running on commodity servers back in 2007. The SDS solution was initially dubbed Virtual Server Array (VSA). With the acquisition the LeftHand name all but disappeared and the portfolio was re-branded to StoreVirtual. The LeftHand OS remained though (as well as its versioning system).
HPE properly re-launched LeftHand’s SDS proposition as StoreVirtual VSA in the final quarter of 2012. Starting at version 9.5, the products has since developed in stages to today’s 12.6 release. Along the way HPE combined the hardware agnostic software with its own server hardware and management software into an HPE owned hyper-converged solution stack. Late 2014 the Converged System 200-HC family was born. The 200-HC family is built upon HP Apollo technology that basically provides uniform 2U 4-node building blocks and is managed with HP OneView software. At the start of Q2 2016 the HPE HyperConverged family expanded with the HC380 when HPE combined its proven Proliant DL380 server hardware with the StoreVirtual VSA software and enhanced management software.
But what exactly does the HPE StoreVirtual VSA software bring to the table? First of all, the SDS platform fully supports the most common hypervisors today: VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM (multiple distributions). It runs on many different hardware configurations and natively has snap-shotting, replication, storage tiering and stretched clustering capabilities. In addition, HPE StoreVirtual VSA allows architects to build magnetic-only, all-flash or hybrid solutions. Currently the biggest drawbacks are lack of intelligent data efficiency capabilities (de-duplication and compression), limited protocol support (iSCSI-only) and the absence of VM-centricity. Management is getting better, with HPE integrating more with its OneView offering. This is mostly beneficial for the hyper-converged solutions though.
For detailed information on HPE’s SDS/HCI offering as well as a means to perform an extensive comparison to other platforms, WhatMatrix has added the following platforms and versions:
– HPE StoreVirtual VSA 12.6 (SDS)
– HPE HC380 1.1 (HCI)
– HPE HC250 1.3 (HCI)
Please visit the updated SDS/HCI comparison tables here. Enjoy the updated comparison!
Herman Rutten – Lead Category Consultant (SDS & HCI)
PS As always, we love your feedback – challenge individual features (simply by clicking on the table field itself), or provide general feedback via email or site contact
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