The question on many people’s minds, especially since HP’s dramatic decision to split the company, has been whether it is preparing its new Enterprise entity for a merger with an equal non-competitor, such as storage giant EMC.

Monday’s announcement by HP, during VMworld Europe in Barcelona, of two new series of storage appliances designed for easy plug-in to virtual environments, suggests the new "Hewlett-Packard Enterprise" is positioning itself more like an EMC competitor than a division.

Granted, VMware is owned by EMC. But it’s a combination of VMware’s existing vSphere management system, and its recently announced EVO:RAIL branded hardware platforms, that are enabling HP to produce competitive alternatives to EMC storage appliances: specifically, so-called hyper-converged appliances that are actually servers pre-configured to integrate with VMware environments.

Zero touch
"Our customers were demanding a super-simple, zero-touch admin type of approach," states Rob Strechay, HP’s director of product management for software-defined storage. Its new 200-series StoreVirtual appliances are geared, its product managers tell us, for businesses that need to add storage in a matter of minutes, along with the server power to manage it.

Their compute nodes are essentially repurposed ProLiant SL2500 servers, and their infrastructure management platform will be an upgraded version of HP OneView, adding a feature called InstantOn.

Strechay says InstantOn is designed to enable the entire storage system to be provisioned and integrated into the existing storage pool, in 15 minutes or less.

"We had great roots in the server side of the company," says Strechay, "and what we wanted to do is cross our different business units to bring the technology that we had to bear, here... so that they don’t have to learn a lot of storage technology. In fact, our OneView InstantOn wrapper will actually extend the cluster by one four-node appliance; if you buy another four-node appliance, it will actually cluster the two together into 8 nodes, again under that 15-minute mark."

StoreVirtual model 240-HC includes 16 8-core CPUs per node clocked at 2.0 GHz, with 512 GB of RAM (expandable), and 24 1.2 TB small-form-factor SAS drives. That’s not a particularly high-performance buildout, and HP knows it.

"We saw that not every mid-sized company was looking for a performance-oriented, SSD-laden device," says Strechay. "Some of them actually have capacity constraints that they’re dealing with, so we went with our 1.2 TB pluggable SAS drives there."

By comparison, the 242-HC is decked out, with 20 10-core CPUs per node clocked at 2.8 GHz. There’s a full 1 TB of RAM on-board, but there’s also a split complement of 16 1.2 TB SAS drives and 8 400 GB SSD drives with Adaptive Optimization.

"What we’ve done there is leverage our intellectual property for our [3PAR] Adaptive Optimization tiering software inside of StoreVirtual," Strecaey continues. AO enables the storage system to migrate volume regions among storage tiers, placing the most frequently accessed regions in a location with the lowest latency.

How easy will it be for customers to integrate one of these StoreVirtual units into an existing environment where there are already storage constraints? Strechay tells us, "The long answer is, it depends on what their current configuration is."

Assuming the customer is already up and running on VMware, he says, it’s actually quite easy. A customer may use the migration capabilities in StoreVirtual’s software, or VMware’s existing tools.

Available as an EVO:RAIL
Alternately, HP will be offering a co-branded edition of the appliance with VMware called ConvergedSystem, making HP the third major vendor after EMC and Dell to offer EVO:RAIL storage servers that follow VMware’s specifications, using mid-range Intel Xeon processors.

Strechay admits that the typical customer use-case for any of these models is not the small business looking to vault itself from a 20th century SAN onto a non-traditional platform.

That customer may be better served with HP’s existing BL-series blade servers.

Rather, the ideal StoreVirtual customer may desire a storage platform for a distribution center that can run one demanding, all-encompassing supply chain application, plus file storage, print server capability, and database management, all virtualized on one platform. None of this goes down without the distribution center going down with it. "You want to put it on something that’s redundant and highly disaster-proof."

"Part of our announcement with VMware was to co-invest a roadmap around HP OneView, our core infrastructure management platform for convergence," remarks Jeff Carlat, HP’s director of product management for converged solutions. "Our integration there with VMware is to be able to bridge the hyper-converged world of EVO:RAIL appliances and clusters into the traditional IT environment, and be able to have it managed holistically as one, to update the firmware at the touch of a button, and to bring it into the fold of the pre-existing environment. So that is a big, big focus for us, to make sure these beasts don’t turn into silos of IT — that’s exactly what we’re trying to eliminate through converged infrastructure and ConvergedSystem."