New offerings from HP are aimed at helping small and midsize businesses and government agencies to maximize storage investments. The products include the next generation of its MSA entry disk array, enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio, and a new program for HP channel partners.
The new HP MSA 2040 Storage system simplifies management and improves performance up to four times faster than similarly priced external disk storage solutions and the enhanced HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio enables SMBs to efficiently manage and protect increasing amounts of file data without the need for special skills.
Both solutions are available under HP’s new Simply StoreIT program, which offers training, marketing and incentives for HP channel partners to address their small and midsized customers’ challenges.
“We have seen more and more data center needs start to apply to smaller environments,” Brad Parks, a senior manager focused on go-to-market strategies at HP Storage, tells 5 Minute Briefing. To address this trend, the products and programs deliver higher performance and support increased capacity needs in smaller environments, as well as remote sites in enterprises and departmental deployments in larger environments, says Parks.
Latest Generation HP MSA Release
This latest generation MSA release is aimed at delivering on some of the emerging performance requirements that we see customers in this entry SAN space starting to look for, Parks notes. “SMB or small site doesn’t necessarily mean small IT demands.” While customers in this space are looking for basic building blocks and an entry price solution, he says, they don’t want to sacrifice performance or access to technologies like solid state disk.
The new HP MSA 2040 Storage offers 16 gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity. This bandwidth, along with a high-performance controller that maximizes solid-state disk performance, supports increasing workloads and maximizes dollar per input/output operation. The MSA 2040 helps customers reduce footprint and energy costs with support for more virtual machines on less hardware. The MSA 2040 also provides an in-place upgrade feature that allows customers on the previous MSA generation to move existing disk drives into the new HP MSA 2040. In addition, customers can maximize existing resources using a management interface that server administrators currently use with HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers.
Upgraded HP StoreEasy Storage Portfolio
Integrating seamlessly with Microsoft Windows infrastructure, the upgraded HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio enables customers -- including SMBs, midrange and enterprise customers to store, manage and protect unstructured data. It also provides persistent file and application availability. “File growth has been a substantial challenge over the last several years, outpacing a lot of the structured data growth,” observes Parks.
New enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio enable customers to reduce administrative time by simplifying creation of new volumes and optimizing capacity with a new provisioning tool; lower costs and improve capacity planning by examining existing file shares on local or remote systems, and predicting the capacity space savings delivered by HP StoreEasy’s native deduplication.
The new release also allow users to ensure data availability with integrated snapshot management for quick file recovery, and enhance productivity with a new wizard that accelerates configuration of clustered HP StoreEasy 3830 Gateways.
HP Partner Program - Simply StoreIT
And finally HP has also added a new program for channel partners in the HP's Just Right IT program, which spans servers, storage, networking and services. The new HP Simply StoreIT Program provides solution guides and reference architectures for HP channel partners and SMB customers to accelerate solution delivery - targeting specific challenges in the critical areas of virtualization, backup and data protection, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server, and file consolidation.
More information is available about the HP MSA 2040 Storage system, the HP StoreEasy Storage, and the new Simply StoreIT program.