HP has updated the LeftHand OS to version 11.5; LeftHand OS powers the latest HP StoreVirtual storage platforms and virtual storage appliance (VSA). This upgrade comes with new features as well as enhancements to several existing features. The largest updates target VSA users, with the addition of Adaptive Optimization (AO) which is the auto-tiering functionality found in hybrid StoreVirtual solutions like the 4335 1U nodes. AO will also now come included with 10TB and 50TB VSA licenses.
HP has updated the LeftHand OS to version 11.5; LeftHand OS powers the HP StoreVirtual storage platforms and virtual storage appliance (VSA). This upgrade comes with new features as well as enhancements to several existing features. The largest updates target VSA users, with the addition of Adaptive Optimization (AO) which is the auto-tiering functionality found in hybrid StoreVirtual solutions like the 4335 1U nodes. AO will also now come included with 10TB and 50TB VSA licenses.
HP StoreVirtual Storage offers highly versatile storage solutions, both hardware platforms and software-defined solutions. These all-inclusive enterprise-level solutions have the flexibility to meet the changing demands and growth in virtual machine count. The platforms are designed with high availability to ease of use in mind and businesses can use one or a combination, leveraging the same features and management.
Left Hand OS 11.5 new features include:
- Adaptive Optimization – sub-volume auto-tiering to accelerate workloads. StoreVirtual VSAs will automatically and transparently move blocks of data between SSD/HDD tiers based on access patterns while being continuously monitored.
- More capacity options – through larger virtual machine disks sizes and larger physical disk mappings to a single instance of the StoreVirtual VSA, capacity can be increased up to 50TB. StoreVirtual VSA now has three capacity licenses: 4TB, 10TB, and 50TB the latter two include the AO feature.
- Simplified storage provisioning for VMs – Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 SP1 can now integrate with storage pools on HP StoreVirtual via SMI-S allowing the provisioning of new volumes to Hyper-V hosts and quick provisioning of VMs from the Virtual Machine Manager's (VMM) library. To make use of this integration, users simply have to add HP StoreVirtual to the array management in VMM.
- REST API – via a RESTful interface, this new feature provides a new, fast, and platform-independent way for management and storage provisioning. This feature provides access to information about storage pools, provisioning operations for volumes, snapshots, and servers, and enables the new Cinder driver in OpenStack "Icehouse" (the driver is aimed at simplifying management and orchastation of cloud infrastructures built on HP StoreVirtual Storage).
Enhanced features include:
- Online upgrade – smart updates for specific environments downloaded and installed when ready or Automatic Online Upgrades for immediate upgrades.
- Improved command-line interface – the average performance is 80% faster compared to previous versions.
- More control over application-managed snapshots – along with more control the snapshots are quicker and easier to install.
- Snapshot management optimization – keeps snapshots on volumes with high frequency snapshot schedules setting the categorization to "consolidating" snapshot that doesn't take up additional space on the system.
- HP StoreVirtual Recovery Manager 1.2 – the newest version of HP StoreVirtual Recovery Manager allows file recovery and folders from snapshots through Fibre channel connectivity to HP StoreVirtual, enables the discovery, smart search capabilities, and recovery to any location, and can be used to automatically access up to five of the most recent snapshots of a volume.
Availability
LeftHand OS 11.5 is available now and will ship with new systems in Q3 of this year.
