You want to use VMware vSphere™ cloud operating system because of its advanced virtualisation capabilities. But the cost of shared storage is keeping you from realising its full benefits.

What is more, you certainly want high availability storage for your virtual servers – but you lack the budget and room for a physical SAN system. You have disk capacity in your servers running VMware. Why not take advantage of it?

Now you have options – with a virtual SAN appliance ideally suited for midsized businesses or remote and branch office use.

The concept is deceptively simple: HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) software creates a shared storage node using disk drives and compute resources that already exist within your physical server running VMware vSphere.

The nodes can be clustered together to transform your existing server storage into a clustered storage system that you manage as a single virtual SAN supporting VMware. With this configuration, you can take full advantage of VMware vSphere advanced features – including high availability, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler and Site Recovery Manager.

As you need to, you can scale without disruption by adding additional storage nodes. The P4000 VSA is a full-featured SAN with all the bells and whistles. You reap all the benefits, while keeping costs low and footprint small.

Easy to deploy and use, the P4000 VSA installs easily on any VMware-certified server. It’s also fully integrated with the HP LeftHand P4000 SAN appliance. Plus, it’s a nice fit when your organisation doesn't have the time or on-staff expertise needed to manage a physical SAN.

And what does VMware think about the P4000 VSA? The company recognises VSA as a certified SAN storage device for VMware and lists it in the VMware SAN/Storage Compatibility Guide.

If yours is a smaller company, consider the P4000 VSA when you:

• Want a highly available IT infrastructure using VMware vSphere
• Need a cost effective shared storage solution to support your VMware vSphere environment
• Cannot justify the cost, space or need for external shared storage to support VMware advanced features

If you are looking to bring high availability to a remote site or branch office, the P4000 VSA is the ideal choice when you:

• Have already implemented virtualisation at your company headquarters
• Need to replicate data to another site
• Cannot justify or support a SAN or NAS system at remote or branch location

Of course, the P4000 VSA may not always be the right virtualised storage solution for your environment. You’ll need to evaluate your needs and criteria before making a final choice. For example, you’ll want to consider the VSA if you have one or two, maybe as many as four, VMware servers running virtual machines on each.

If you have more VMware servers than that, you should consider the HP LeftHand P4000 SAN or an HP StorageWorks Fibre Channel-based SAN solution. Either would be a logical choice when it comes to price, performance, scalability and manageability.

Tennessee-based law firm Rainey, Kizer, Reviere & Bell PLC sought to upgrade its disaster recovery capabilities. The solution? WMware Infrastructure 3 transformed a blade chassis into easily administered virtual machines to provide continuous application availability. The VSA transformed the disks in the blade chassis into highly available SAN storage.

'I installed VMware Infrastructure 3 in 20 minutes, the HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance in another 20 minutes, and had an enterprise-class disaster recovery solution up and running in less than an hour,' says Koie Smith, IT administrator.

As a result, the law firm saved US$100,000 in hardware costs, shaved hours off IT administration time and avoided heavy implementation expenses.

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