Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/17/get_a_swdefined_storage_experience/

Kids, guess where we're going for Easter? France for a 'software-defined storage experience'

The trip of an inode's lifetime

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Storage, 17th April 2014 15:01 GMT

Not only are HP and Red Hat together touting a software-defined storage experience, they're touting an "open software-defined storage experience", which must be better, because, er, it's open.

The "experience" can be had at HP's Customer Centre, located in Grenoble, France. Up to three ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 servers, with as many as 60 3.5-inch SATA drives, all in a single 4.3U enclosure, are available for a hands-on. That gives customers 240TB of capacity using 4TB drives to test drive, and 1.16PB in a single cabinet of nine such enclosures.

The software on rigs is open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the Gluster distributed file system. The whole caboodle is focussed on big, unstructured, enterprise data workloads and is said to be ideal for:

Red Hat and HP also launched "a solution portal for online demonstrations of the joint solution and various workloads." To get your paws on the physical "open software-defined storage experience", you'll have to collar a sales reps to book a visit to HP's Grenoble facility. ®