Last week at HPE Discover, HPE introduced the idea of a Composable Data Fabric on the show floor to customers. While there was no specific product announcement around the concept, the idea is HPE’s vision for the future of software defined storage. The overall strategy will utilize HPE OneView for management and control along with HPE StoreVirtual as the storage platform.
Composable Data Fabric is the idea of federation and data mobility within software defined storage. Regardless of how you start with StoreVirtual, HPE is working to create the ability to move your data from one StoreVirtual system to another. This will offer its customers the ability to migrate their data seamlessly and nondisruptively to and from any form factor to another. The solution will be hardware agnostic since it is based on HPE StoreVirtual – meaning it can be installed on standard HPE ProLiant servers, purpose built HPE StoreVirtual hardware, StoreVirtual VSA on ESXi and inside of Synergy Platform, HyperConvered and ConvergedSystem solutions. One of the main goals is to ease the disruptive and difficult nature of data migrations.
Composable Data Fabric is also about enabling all the needed services within StoreVirtual – specifically adding the ability to do file services and object storage, in addition to block. In the near future, HPE is saying that StoreVirtual will be able to natively host file services, the same way that 3PAR StoreServ arrays are able to.
The Composable Data Fabric idea continues on the path of growth and innovation to the StoreVirtual line of storage. Within the Synergy Platform composable infrastructure strategy, StoreVirtual plays the key role to unlocking local disks within one frame and exposing that data storage to systems throughout the rest of the data fabric or network connected to the Synergy. Because StoreVirtual allows Synergy to become its own storage array, Synergy can become a self-contained platform for hosting any application – whether its cloud-native, virtualized or traditional client-server, with the ability to flex and change as requirements change.
The primary takeaway from the announcement is that customers will enjoy complete flexibility and mobility for their data between StoreVirtual installations – regardless of the shape or size. By mixing different instances of StoreVirtual with different performance capabilities, its easy to envision a great software-defined storage with tiers of storage based on performance or cost. Add the ability to move data seamlessly between them as the requirements of the data change, and that becomes a winning combination.
