Virtualization continues to be the fastest-growing infrastructure trend, but adoption remains a challenge at smaller sites that lack the budget, space and storage expertise required by enterprise-class storage solutions. Service providers also struggle to achieve affordable shared storage with advanced capabilities they can then sell to their customers. Seeing an opportunity, HP has announced that it is providing a 1 TB 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 well as new HP ProLiant Generation 9 (Gen9) Server models.
HP said that it will distribute licenses for more than 72 petabytes of software-defined storage (SDS) capacity at no additional charge to customers. Under this program, any customer that purchases an Intel Xeon processor E5 v3-based server will be able to download HP StoreVirtual VSA software and obtain a license for 1 TB of SDS 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.”
“Intel processors are the smart choice for a software-defined world,” added Bev Crair, general manager for Intel’s storage division. “Purpose-built to support the agile, efficient data center, Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors provide the optimal platform for delivering intelligent storage while meeting compute and networking needs across the software-defined data center.”