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HP Delivers Day 1 Storage For vSphere 6

by Adam Armstrong

With VMware's new releases in vSphere 6, HP will be delivering Day 1 support and certification for vSphere 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) across midrange, high-end, and all-flash arrays. HP will allow customers to upgrade vSphere as soon as they are ready on HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage arraysHP StoreVirtualMSA, and XP storage platforms.


With VMware's new releases in vSphere 6, HP will be delivering Day 1 support and certification for vSphere 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) across midrange, high-end, and all-flash arrays. HP will allow customers to upgrade vSphere as soon as they are ready on HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage arrays, HP StoreVirtual, MSA, and XP storage platforms.

The new updates to vSphere include a higher performance and more scalable Virtual SAN with all-flash architecture. And the addition of Virtual Volumes (vVols) with allows arrays to become VM-aware. vVols is a set of APIs that enable a granular integration between storage arrays (SAN/NAS) and vSphere at the VM level, in a VM by VM basis. This enables storage arrays, defined by the storage administrators, to provision capacity and data services for each VM giving organizations more agile, cost-efficient, and easy to manage storage infrastructure.

Not all of the storage industry is ready to support the advance virtualization capacity of vSphere 6 but early adoption partners such as Dell and HP have been selected to help bring the new capabilities and features to customer right away. HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage was selected as the only Fibre Channel reference platform for its vVols development at the start of the program. This close collaboration gives HP all the expertise necessary to tap the benefits of vSphere's new features with 3PAR StoreServ.

Some of the benefits of 3PAR StoreServ and vSphere 6 include:

  • Customers can deploy vSphere Virtual Volumes on 3PAR knowing that VMware has completed development and qualification using the 3PAR platform from the very beginning as its only Fibre Channel reference platform
  • From Day 1, customers cam take advantage of the availability of vSphere 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes on existing and new 3PAR platforms with the latest release of the 3PAR Operating System 3.2.1 MU2
  • Handle an order of magnitude more volumes simply and with high service levels by combining the headroom of the 3PAR array, which supports up to 64,000 Virtual Volume objects, with its powerful quality-of-service management capabilities
  • Support service level agreements and service level objectives across thousands of virtual machines autonomically, without the need for any administrative interaction. Prioritize and manage mission-critical VMs by IOPS, bandwidth, or latency goals simply with 3PAR Priority Optimization software.
  • Increase resiliency and business continuity via built-in vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) providers on each 3PAR controller node, thereby protecting information exchange between VMs and applications in the event of a VASA provider failure without the complexity of external, VM-based VASA providers. Benefit from simplified management with 0-step installation of VASA, integrated right into the 3PAR controller.
  • Reduce storage capacity requirements for vSphere Virtual Volumes by 75% or more, since all HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Thin Clone, and Thin Deduplication capabilities are integrated not just in software through vSphere APIs, but are also integrated and accelerated in silicon, delivering world-class efficiency without performance tradeoffs
  • Enable operating cost reductions through simpler administration, made possible by policy-based, and complete infrastructure management of HP server, storage, networking, and data protection systems via a single, updated HP OneView for VMware vCenter plug-in

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