HP Focuses on the Changing Nature of IT Within SMBs

Not too long ago, the line between small-to-medium (SMB) businesses and larger enterprise IT organizations was fairly distinct. But as IT has evolved within the SMB sector, there are a lot more companies that require fairly substantial amounts of IT infrastructure even though they have less than 500 employees.

The fundamental change with the SMB sector is pushing IT vendors to rethink their entire product portfolios. Case in point is Hewlett-Packard, which this week unveiled an entry-level, Fibre-channel storage system that provides up to 16 Gb of throughput.

The HP MSA 2040 storage system can be configured with supports of up to 199 Small Form Factor (SFF) HDDS or 96 Large Form Factor (LFF) drives. The current biggest SFF drive is 1.2TB, resulting in an MSA 2040 capacity of 238.8TB. The current biggest LFF is 3TB, resulting in a 288TB maximum for MSA 2040. Solid-state drives would be theoretically a maximum of 199, but more typical configurations would have four to 12 SSDs.

The HP MSA 2040 also includes new tools for simplifying the creation of new volumes and providing capacity, while also allowing administrators to examine file shares on local or remote systems to better predict storage capacity requirements before and after deduplication. The HP MSA 2040 also includes tools for integrated snapshot management for quick file recovery and a new wizard that accelerates configuration of clustered HP StoreEasy 3830 Gateways. Finally, the HP MSA 2040 can be easily integrated with a variety of cloud-based data protection services from HP.

At a time when storage capacity requirements are rising everywhere, HP is trying to make the case for Fibre-channel-class storage technology that is usually associated with enterprise IT. According to Brad Parks, senior manager for GTM strategy and messaging at HP, within certain types of IT organizations there is a need for enterprise-IT-class technology; they just don’t have the staff normally required to manage it. To that end, Parks says HP is trying to simplify the management of enterprise IT technology in way that actually makes it consumable by SMB organizations that typically for any length of time don’t have many people to handle any given task.