Ten Recommendations for Simplified, Intelligence-Based Storage Management
The amount and types of data that small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) need to contend with continues to grow. So do the challenges associated with managing it all while maintaining application performance. To help organizations with limited budgets wrangle content and speed up their applications, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has added support for solid-state disk (SSD) drives to its HPE MSA Array portfolio. They have also reconfigured their network-attached storage (NAS) system in a way that allows 28 magnetic drives to be packed in a 2U form factor that provides access to 224TB of storage.
Vish Mulchand, senior director of product management and marketing for storage at HPE, says that for the first time, an entry level storage area network (SAN) in the form of the HPE MSA 140 is priced at less than $8,500.
Meanwhile, Mulchand says, the HPE StoreEasy 1650 Expanded can accommodate twice as many drives as before to create one of the densest NAS appliances in the SMB market.
SMB organizations are not struggling with Big Data as much as they are simply trying to cope with the rise of, for example, video. Mulchand notes that video and images of all kinds are now routinely captured on mobile computing devices, which inevitably find their way on to a storage system. The challenge SMB organizations have is finding a way to economically store that data in a way that doesn’t increase of the overall physical footprint of their IT environment.
As for application performance, Mulchand says SMBs are now looking to take advantage of SSDs to boost application performance in what for many of them is the simplest way possible.
There’s no doubt that the storage needs of SMBs are evolving rapidly. The key is to make sure that managing storage remains relatively simple regardless of how much data may actually be involved.
