A number of years ago, a then-independent LeftHand Networks released a revolutionary product into the market.  This product, what LeftHand named Virtual SAN Appliance or VSA, allowed organizations to harness local host-based server storage and aggregate that storage with storage from other servers in a cluster.  Under this aggregation method, the harnessed storage became a shared resource in the eyes of the vSphere hosts and, as a result, those hosts, using just their local storage and the VSA software, were suddenly considered full players in the full vSphere feature set, including those features that required the use of shared storage, such as vMotion.

In addition to simply aggregating (or virtualizing) the direct-attached storage from among all servers in the cluster, LeftHand’s VSA software also allowed administrators to manage this storage layer using the LeftHand storage management console, providing administrators with a familiar way to manage the storage layer.

Of course, LeftHand is no longer independent.  Recently, HP, who bought LeftHand way back in 2008 and acquired VSA as a part of that transaction, released a new, rebranded, less expensive and improved version of VSA.  Dubbed HP StoreVirtual VSA, the product retains the administrative console from the LeftHand line of products, but, under the hood, HP has made some improvements.

What’s New?

First, the new product now carries with it an increased storage limit of 10 TB per server, which is a far cry from the original 2 TB per server that was in place when the product originally shipped.  I questioned HP about this limit, asking if it was an artificial limit or a technical one and the company admitted that the limit is artificial and will likely be increased over time, making VSA more scalable.

While increasing the overall product capacity, HP has also lowered the price to $3,500 per server on the high end for a single server, but dropping to as low as $700 per server in especially large environments.  This makes VSA an affordable option, even for smaller environments that are cost conscious.  Take, for example, a three-server cluster with each server having the maximum 10 TB of capacity.  In essence, for around $10,000 a company would be able to “SAN-enable” that 30 TB of space.

On the warranty and support front, HP now includes a standard three-year support contract for each copy of VSA sold.  This is an improvement from the one-year support contract that used to accompany the software.

The way it works

As has been the case from the beginning of VSA, the latest version retains a number of the key features that make it a player in the shared storage space:

• VSA can be installed on any server that is running either vSphere or Hyper-V.  The server does not need to be an HP system.
• Using the VSA network RAID capability, data can be synchronously replicated between clustered nodes.
• For DR purposes, organizations can use asynchronous replication to replicate data to remote sites.
• Ability to leverage thin provisioning to optimize storage utilization.
• The VSA tool also supports snapshots.
• VSA will leverage different kinds of storage for different purposes as long as administrators create the appropriate pools.  For example, an SSD pool for performance and a SATA pool for capacity.

A Growing Option for the SMB and Midmarket

Although LeftHand pioneered the play, the VSA space has grown since that time.  Even VMware got into the game with their uniquely named VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA), although the VM.  Other players include PHD Virtual, FalconStor, and others.

For SMBs and the midmarket, the HP VSA could be an option for particularly cost-conscious organizations that have a lot of local storage and want to gain enterprise-level storage and hypervisor capabilities.