As part of an effort to make it simpler for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to modernize their IT infrastructure environments, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) in partnership with Zynstra today unveiled an HPE Proliant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid converged appliance that can be remotely administered by HPE or its IT services partners via the cloud.
McLeod Glass, vice president and general manager for SMB solutions and tower servers at HPE, says the goal is to leverage the investments HPE has made in the HPE Gen8 server platform to create a purpose-built appliance that combines compute and storage in a way that can be remotely managed using virtualization and cloud management software developed by Zynstra.
Based on the latest Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 processor series and priced starting at $299, Glass says the HPE Proliant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid appliance is ideally suited for organizations that have 25 to 50 employees. SMB customers can daisy-chain multiple HPE Proliant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid appliances together to create a cluster as well as opt to scale out storage using a 24TB storage appliance. The management software created by Zynstra can be hosted on Amazon Web Services or any OpenStack-compliant cloud platform such as HP Helion.
Glass says the HPE Proliant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid appliance is the first in a series of converged systems that HPE plans to deliver as part of an effort to make IT infrastructure much simpler to manage. Despite all the hype surrounding the public cloud, Glass notes that 95 percent of the application workloads in SMB organizations still run on premise. Glass says the vast majority of those workloads are going to continue to run on premise for the foreseeable future for a wide range of reasons, from regulatory compliance to application latency.
It remains to be seen how this approach to managing IT will be received by SMB organizations, many of whom are notoriously slow to upgrade their IT infrastructure environment. HPE is clearly betting that many of them would rather apply a large portion of the time and money they spend managing IT on their own somewhere else. At an entry price of under $300, the HPE Proliant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid appliance may finally be that IT deal that is just too good to ignore.