HP offers 1TB StoreOnce VSA for free

A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today:

The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA), in which he provides more information about the free 1 TB StoreOnce VSA.

HP StoreOnce VSA

HP StoreOnce VSA runs with the same software as the hardware-based StoreOnce appliances, but it’s delivered as a VM. You can run the VM on top of VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V or KVM. Beside the free 1 TB license, the StoreOnce VSA can purchased with 4 TB, 10 TB or 50 TB capacity (usable, non-deduplicated). In contrast to the hardware-based appliances, the StoreOnce VSA comes with licenses for replication and StoreOnce Catalyst. This makes the StoreOnce VSA a perfect fit for remote and branch offices. You can quickly deploy the StoreOnce VSA and replicate the backuped data to the central datacenter. But you can also deploy the VSA with the 4 TB, 10 TB or 50 TB license in your central datacenter and use it as a replication target for StoreOnce VSAs in the remote and branch offices (the replication target needs the replication license). A single VSA can act as replication target for up to 8 StoreOnce VSA and/ or StoreOnce appliances. You can scale the free 1 TB license with license upgrades to 4 TB, 10 TB and 50 TB. The StoreOnce VSA supports Catalyst, VTL (iSCSI) and as NAS (CIFS or NFS) backup targets. Take a look into the QuickSpecs for more information. I also recommend to read the two blog posts from Ashwin Shetty on Around the Storage Block:

Last year I’ve published several posts about the StoreOnce VSA. I recommend to download the free 1 TB StoreOnce VSA and to play with it. Some of my blog posts should help you get started.