New HPE Entry-Level Storage Products Boast Flash, SDS Capabilities

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) partners serving small and medium-size business (SMB) customers have new storage solutions to sell to these and entry-level storage companies with the introduction Monday of the HPE StoreVirtual 3200 and HPE MSA 2042 products.

The new products provide a path to, what HPE defines as – per IDC – the sub-$25,000 entry storage segment, hybrid flash and software-defined storage capabilities that have up until now been available in enterprise class products.

“We’re bringing these product capabilities down to a lower price point because entry-level companies want to take advantage of flash and software-defined storage as much as the big guys,” said Brad Parks, director of go-to-market strategy and enablement, HP Storage.

The new StoreVirtual 3200, is the latest entrant in HPEs StoreVirtual Storage product line. It uses the same underlying operating system and technology, i.e. software-defined and hyper-converged infrastructure, found in higher-end solutions, but at a $6,000 price point, according to the vendor.

“It provides an on-ramp for small companies looking to move in that direction,” Parks said.{ad}

The StoreVirtual 3200 provides customers with a future-proof path for growth through a composable data fabric that spans HPE StoreVirtual Systems and VSA software running seamlessly on HPE ProLiant servers, HPE hyperconverged appliances, and HPE Synergy, the company said.

HPE noted that it has deployed more than 200,000 high-end StoreVirtual units at a starting price of tens of thousands of dollars for a multinode cluster.

This latest release also offers a simplified management user interface for SMB customers. And HPE is extending cloud-based analytics capabilities to StoreVirtual users. Users and partners get access to a web portal for detailed data, such as performance, capacity, trouble tickets, patching, etc. about the system or systems, for user insight.

“From the partner perspective, that’s insight that they could bring to their customer and as part of the sales motion, they could proactively add value into that account relationship,” Parks suggested.

The company’s flagship entry-level storage line, MSA SAN array storage – that to date boasts a half-million units deployed – on Monday got a boost with the addition of the new MSA 2042 product. The latest storage line entrant is a hardware and software package that delivers enterprise-level storage features such as flash acceleration, automated tiering and snapshot replication capabilities for under $10,000.

The product scales with any combination of supported flash and traditional disk drives, and as with other MSA products, the 2042 offers data-in-place upgrades, according to HPE.

“That’s a lot of bang for the buck when selling to the SMB market is key to winning,” Parks noted.

HPE is enabling partners to sell the two new storage products via distribution, training resources, the rollout of hundreds of demo units, and proof of concept instruction.

About 70 percent of HPE SMB storage products are sold through the channel, primarily Silver level partners and below, according to Parks.