Along with a number of new storage offerings designed for the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, Hewlett-Packard Co. has also taken the wraps off a new partner program designed to help partners penetrate that market.
To complement HP’s Just Right IT program for servers, storage, networking and services, the vendor has created the Simply StoreIT Program. It provides solution guides and reference architectures for 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.
The program will be launched with HP’s distribution partners, and include tools, resources and incentives, such as quote and configuration templates and cobranded lead-generation assets.
On the product side, HP launched its MSA entry disk array and made enhancements to the HP StoreEasy Storage portfolio.
“Virtualization and other emerging workloads threaten to drown SMBs in a sea of complexities that hinder, rather than support, growth,” said David Scott, senior vice-president and general manager of HP’s storage division, in a statement. “Simply StoreIT allows our partners to serve their small and midsized customers who are stressed for time, budget and resources to support a growing business, with a stress-free storage solution.”
The new HP MSA 2040 Storage fibre channel array offers 16 gigabit Fibre Channel connectivity and is built to support increased demand, with a high-performance controller and solid-state disk performance. HP promises a reduced data centre footprint and lower energy costs, protection for earlier investments with a data-in-place upgrade feature that allows customers on the previous MSA generation to move existing disk drives into the MSA 2040, and the same management interface that server administrators currently use with HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers.
Dual-controller MSA 2040 configurations begin at US$11,470, with worldwide availability through the channel in July.
