HP P4000 VSA teaches dumb storage new tricks

Infoworld - Since Hewlett-Packard acquired LeftHand Networks in 2008, it has continued to develop LeftHand's complete line of software-based iSCSI storage under the HP LeftHand P4000-series moniker. Based on the feature-rich SAN/iQ 9.5 software platform, the currently available P4000 G2 series includes a range of different physical form factors based on HP's ProLiant server line, as well as the virtualized P4000 VSA (Virtual SAN Appliance), which runs on VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.

At its heart, the P4000 VSA is simply a virtualized (and thus hardware agnostic) version of the same SAN/iQ software that powers its physical brethren. Though the virtualized version comes with notable scalability limitations, it offers a great deal of flexibility in configuring storage either in concert with physical P4000-series SANs or on its own as a purely virtual SAN.

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