In a big announcement out of Palo Alto today, HP rolled out their new HP Converged Storage technology. This investment in the transition to software-defined storage (SDS) is confirmation of what we at SiliconANGLE have been reporting on for some time. HP’s new StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) promises to significantly reduce IT costs for businesses and organizations.

In addition to reducing cost, companies that elect to transition to SDS will also enjoy increased agility and capacity utilization. This has been brought about thanks to new features like automated sub-LUN (logical unit number) storage tiering along with increased VMWare and Microsoft integration meant to affect performance while improving overall efficiency.

For those organizations still utilizing a traditional warehouse model for their data storage will also find it easier to adopt virtualization thanks to a new licensing structure also announced today. These new options are intended to provide deployment flexibility to support current workload requirements and future growth needs for the enterprise.

As has been noted here at SiliconANGLE, the trend has been towards adoption of virtualized environments. Many smaller organizations may have, through budgetary constraints or ignorance to the new technology, been reticent to adopt virtualization. A big benefit to HP’s new VSA is that it can be easily managed by IT generalists in both VMWare and Microsoft environments. Additionally, the VSA can be installed three times faster than other competitive SDS options. Also interesting is that this new VSA scales capacity 11 times faster than other options on the market.

Speaking to today’s announcement, David Scott, senior vice president and general manager for Storage HP stated, “To reduce data center investment and operational costs, budget-conscious organizations are transitioning from dedicated physical hardware to software-defined storage embedded on existing industry standard servers.” He continued, “Having pioneered software-defined storage with an installed base of over 170,000 StoreVirtual VSA licenses, HP is now extending its leadership in this area with auto-tiering capability to further optimize cost and performance for small or medium-sized businesses as well as remote enterprise branches.”

The VSA, powered by HP’s LeftHand OS along with their new Adaptive Optimization capabilities, makes this the first scale-out SDS solution to offer the aforementioned data tiering. This allows for the movement of data blocks to either high-performance or cost-optimized storage automatically leading to improved efficiency and performance.

Specifically, HP’s Adaptive Optimization enables continuous monitoring of an organizations workload, migrating high-use data to faster storage such as solid-state disk (SSD) while inactive or lesser-used data is relegated to lower-cost storage such as hard disk drive (HDD) storage. With this new functionality, an organizations legacy third-party storage is effectively repurposed and virtualized, bringing it in as a secondary tier within HP’s Adaptive Optimization.

As mentioned above, the new licensing structures will make adoption easier for any sized organization. Whether licensing at the new 4TB level, the original 10TB standard license or the 50TB high-capacity license, an organization can opt for a more suitably sized license and, should need arise, non-disruptively upgrade to a larger VSA or the HP StoreVirtual 4000 appliance.

Early adopters of virtualization have paved the way for what is quickly becoming the de facto technology for data storage. With today’s announcement, HP is making it all too easy for organizations yet to adopt SDS.