StoreVirtual is the result of the 2008 acquisition of LeftHand , an early adopter of storage virtualization converted back into storage appliances, by HP. For several years, StoreVirtual technology has been available as software under the name StoreVirtual VSA.
The software comes in the form of a virtual machine for Windows Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and KVM and allows building a distributed storage system in block mode accessible via Fiber Channel and iSCSI. StoreVirtual VSA is an alternative to VMware's VSAN offering , but also to distributed storage architectures like Dell EMC's ScaleIO (VSA is however optimized to work with a few nodes or tens of nodes, when Scale IO can theoretically support several tens thousands) ..
StoreVirtual VSA relies on a local Raid mechanism coupled with a network Raid mechanism to distribute data to the different nodes participating in the cluster. This eliminates single fault points, but it is paid for by a gross capacity-to-capacity ratio that is lower than that offered by competing technologies. In addition, StoreVirtual VSA does not implement any optimization technology (compression or deduplication), functions that are increasingly standard among competitors.
This absence is offset by the fact that StoreVirtual offers a fairly wide range of data services. The appliance manages thin provisioning and tiering of data. It also delivers a rich set of services such as snapshots, clones, replication, the stretched cluster - which under vSphere allows for example the implementation of vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) architectures ...
In addition to supporting multiple hypervisors, the StoreVirtual VSA virtual appliance also integrates with the OpenStack Cinder API and provides a native plug-in for delivering persistent storage volumes to Docker containers. HPE offers a free technology license to manage 1 TB of usable capacity per Intel Xeon E5-based server. Two pay licenses are available for 10TB and 50TB capacities. Please note that the software is also used by HPE as a basis for its HPE Proliant HC250 and HPE Proliant HC 380 hyperconverged solutions .
The software comes in the form of a virtual machine for Windows Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and KVM and allows building a distributed storage system in block mode accessible via Fiber Channel and iSCSI. StoreVirtual VSA is an alternative to VMware's VSAN offering , but also to distributed storage architectures like Dell EMC's ScaleIO (VSA is however optimized to work with a few nodes or tens of nodes, when Scale IO can theoretically support several tens thousands) ..
StoreVirtual VSA relies on a local Raid mechanism coupled with a network Raid mechanism to distribute data to the different nodes participating in the cluster. This eliminates single fault points, but it is paid for by a gross capacity-to-capacity ratio that is lower than that offered by competing technologies. In addition, StoreVirtual VSA does not implement any optimization technology (compression or deduplication), functions that are increasingly standard among competitors.
This absence is offset by the fact that StoreVirtual offers a fairly wide range of data services. The appliance manages thin provisioning and tiering of data. It also delivers a rich set of services such as snapshots, clones, replication, the stretched cluster - which under vSphere allows for example the implementation of vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) architectures ...
In addition to supporting multiple hypervisors, the StoreVirtual VSA virtual appliance also integrates with the OpenStack Cinder API and provides a native plug-in for delivering persistent storage volumes to Docker containers. HPE offers a free technology license to manage 1 TB of usable capacity per Intel Xeon E5-based server. Two pay licenses are available for 10TB and 50TB capacities. Please note that the software is also used by HPE as a basis for its HPE Proliant HC250 and HPE Proliant HC 380 hyperconverged solutions .