Maxta Inc. is offering up a free but limited version of its hyperconverged, software-defined storage software.

The company, which specializes in software-based hyperconvergence for enterprise storage systems, said a free download of its MxSP software is now available for “qualifying organizations” in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

The freebie has been made available via Maxta’s new freemium licensing model, believed to the the first of its kind in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) segment, and offers a simpler, more economical way for enterprises to test, evaluate and quickly deploy HCI in their environments.

Despite being free the process is not as simple as just downloading and installing the software. Maxta says organizations need to apply, and if successful, will receive a perpetual, transferable license for a fully featured version of its MxSP software free of charge. That will enable them to configure and deploy a three-node HCI cluster with up to 24 terabytes of storage capacity, the company said.

“Since announcing our freemium hyperconvergence licensing model just a month ago we have received hundreds of advance registrations from organizations of all types and sizes,” said Yoram Novick, founder and chief executive officer at Maxta. “This demand underscores the strong interest and need for a simpler, faster and less expensive way to evaluate, test and deploy hyperconverged infrastructure without complicated transitions from the lab to the production environment.”

In addition to making its software free, Maxta has also created a new “Maxta Community” site for registered users of its MxSP software and MaxDeploy appliances. The site offers a forum for users to ask and answer questions, access to Maxta’s engineers and various self-help resources.

Maxta’s MxSP software is designed to help information technology administrators transform their costly and complex virtualized infrastructure into a more agile and efficient setup. It does so by converting the traditionally separate compute and storage tiers. The company claims the result is simpler management and significant cost savings thanks to the elimination of expensive and complicated storage area networks and storage arrays.

The company claims several advantages of using its software-based HCI solution, including the freedom to choose any kind of server, storage and virtualization platform, thereby eliminating vendor lock-in. MxSP-enabled clusters are able to support any kind of x86 server, including all-flash or hybrid configurations. It allows for clusters to be scaled up or scaled out in increments of as small as a single server at a time, while compute-only nodes can be added to scale compute power independently of the storage capacity.

Maxta says that the free MxSP licenses its offering can be upgraded at any time to a premium license, which delivers unlimited scaling capacity and the ability to add server nodes.

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