By Calvin Zito

Last week, I was invited by John Troyer, the host of the VMware Community Podcast, to join his weekly podcast.  I met John at VMworld at the beginning of the month and he needed a partner to be a guest on the podcast.  The format is a Q&A with the live and chat audience.  On the call from HP were:

• John Spiers, former CTO and found of LeftHand Networks, now our HP LeftHand Evangelists
• George Wagner, Product Marketing Manager
• Brad Katz, Support Engineer focused on integration with VMware
• and me, HP Storage Guy aka Calvin Zito

I learned a lot and thought you might benefit from listening to this too.  However, I can't figure out how to easily embedded the podcast here on my blog so let me give you a couple of options to listen to it:

1. Click on this link to open a pop-up streaming version of the webcast (note - it's about 55 minutes long)
2. Right click on this link  and select "Save as" to download the MP3 file - it's a 24MB file

One question that came up during the podcast was a discussion about the pricing of our HP LeftHand VSA (Virtual SAN Appliance) software compared to a physical iSCSI-based array.  We've talked about VSA on previous discussions here so I won't define it - if you're not familiar with it, click here to check out the product page where you can learn more.  Someone on the podcast said that the cost of two VSA licenses was $10,000. and what's the point when you can get a cheap iSCSI array for that.  So I wanted to talk more about that. First, the $10,000 price is a bit high.  The U.S. list price is around 15% less than what was discussed on the call.  So why is there value in software that can take direct attach storage on an ESX server and turn it into shared storage?  Here are a bunch of them:

1. We have a cheaper iSCSI based arrays in our portfolio with our HP StorageWorks MSA family or our recently announced X3000 so it's not as if we don't know that you can get cheaper physical disk arrays. 
2. You have to factor in up to 10TB of disk capacity which is what a single VSA supports - so compare the cost of 10TB of a physical array to the VSA allowing you to share up to 10TB of DAS that are probably sitting there today wasting away. 
3. You get up to 10 VSA licenses with our HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual and Multi-site SANS.  An incredible value.
4. We provide bundles with our servers that make the total purchase of the whole infrastructure - server, network, and storage - very attractive.  These are the HP Virtualization Bundles that I've mentioned here previously.
5. VSA provides all the value of our P4000 SAN including replication, thin provisioning, Smart Clone, Snaps, Volume Copy and more. Last I looked, one competitor was charging an additional $60,000-80,000 for these value add features that are included FREE with both our VSA and P4000.
6. VSA can be spit across sites.  A traditional iSCSI SAN - and this is key - can not.
7. With VSA you can manage other SAN technology behind it if it is shared as a LUN to the server with VSA.
8. With our BladeSystem, VSA can take advantage of existing Flex-10 infrastructure to manage QOS of your bandwidth
9. VSA is software not hardware.  It is "greener" and subject to larger discounts for volume.

So with VSA software, we aren't just providing an easy way to turn DAS into shared storage for VMware but it does so much more. 

I hope that context helps as you listen to the podcasts.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy.  I'd love to hear from you and talk to you more about all things storage.

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