HITS

Enterprise storage capabilities including hybrid flash are becoming increasingly popular, but their relatively high pricing can put them out of reach for many small and midsized businesses (SMBs). Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), however, is out to make it easier for such businesses to afford such high-end storage capabilities with new shared storage solutions it just started shipping, the company said Aug. 15.

The new storage solutions will help SMBs modernize their IT with hybrid flash and software-defined storage platforms that “bring enterprise capabilities to sub-$10K price points,” HPE said in a news release.

HPE didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on what the lowest pricing was for similar storage solutions before this.

Software-designed storage is data storage in which the programming controlling storage-related operations is separated from the physical storage device. Hybrid flash, meanwhile, is a solid state storage system containing a combination of flash memory drives and hard disk drives.

The new HPE StoreVirtual 3200 storage systems start at $6,055, while its new MSA 2042 storage systems start at $9,877. A StoreVirtual Migration Manager will be added in the third quarter of this year at pricing that wasn’t provided.

StoreVirtual 3200 provides an “easy on-ramp” to software-defined storage while the HPE MSA 2042 delivers hybrid flash for application acceleration, the company said. To ease the technology transition to the new advanced storage solutions, tools such as StoreVirtual Migration Manager serve to “simplify and de-risk workload migrations,” it said.

“For years, SMB customers have been forced to subjugate business requirements due to the cost and complexity of enterprise storage,” HPE said. While other companies have deployed flash for app acceleration, leveraged software-defined storage for cost savings, and are “exploring hyper-convergence to accelerate time-to-value, smaller customers and others with entry budgets have been priced out of these game-changing technologies,” it said.

“No matter your size, when it comes to today’s digital transformation, ‘good enough’ storage is no longer good enough,” Bill Philbin, HPE VP and GM, storage, said in the news release. “By lowering the cost of flash and enabling a composable data fabric across storage systems and hyper-converged appliances, HPE is helping customers get off the disposable technology treadmill and onto storage they can grow with, not out of,” he said.

StoreVirtual 3200 provides small and midsized storage customers with a new dual-controller array based on 64-bit ARM technology and advanced storage data services including snapshots, thin provisioning and replication. StoreVirtual 3200 also provides customers with a “futureproof and risk-free path for growth,” HPE said, calling it a “new breed of StoreVirtual array that gives customers the flexibility to consolidate workloads, add flash when they are ready and scale to meet future demands.”

Advanced features are also available that allow the system to address real-time workload changes by dynamically reacting to input/output fluctuations, HPE said. This approach uses only a small amount of flash storage to deliver application acceleration with no user intervention, and that makes it “ideal for server virtualization and productivity apps,” HPE said.