HPE has also enhanced its SMB focused StoreEasy NAS family, and its HPE Flex Solutions for SQL Server.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced enhancements to three of its SMB-focused families – HPE ProLiant Easy Connect, HPE StoreEasy Storage, and HPE Flex Solutions.

“We are very consistent on our strategy for HPE SMB,” said David Sung, Director, Worldwide SMB Server Marketing. “This strategy has three elements: innovation is critical; we have to make it easy to buy and sell; and we have to help our partners lead the conversation.”

HPE’s expansion of the ProLiant Easy Connect family with the new HPE ProLiant Easy Connect ML110 Managed Hybrid Server, expands all three elements.

“We started the Easy Connect family of solutions in April, and this was something that we had never done before,” said David Sung, HPE’s Director, Worldwide SMB Server Marketing. “It reflects the fact that the consumption model is changing slightly. Easy Connect is a managed server solution with wi-fi capability for our MSP partners that they can offer as a subscription, as well as a service with a seamless connection to the Azure cloud.” He indicated that it is used both by true MSPs, as well as by resellers who are supplementing their traditional business by moving slowly into the MSP space.

“The market response has been ecstatic, from both partners and customers, because it lets them focus on what they do best,” Sung said. “It’s really good at running static applications that don’t change dynamically over time, where you are not spinning up lots of new VMs. Partners have told us that there is nothing else like this out there. The alternative before has been DIY – Do It Yourself – where the partner cobbles it together themselves, which costs them a lot more. The MSP then adds higher-end value-added applications on top of it, to get more margin.”

The first offering in this space, the HPE ProLiant Easy Connect EC200A, supported 5-50 end users per site.

“With the Easy Connect ML110, we are expanding this to up to 150 SMB users per site,” Sung stated. “We are also adding support for ConnectWise and Autotask’s PSA tools, as well as Aruba Central integration for WiFi device monitoring.”

HPE also announcing enhancements to the HPE StoreEasy family which include new configurations with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2016, an upgrade to the latest Intel Xeon processors, and high-speed memory.

“HPE StoreEasy is our well established entry NAS for SMBs, which simply serves files to both users and applications,” said Stephen Bacon, Director, Product Management at HPE. “It has held the top market share for the last three years in the sub-$USD 15,000 NAS space.”

Bacon said that one of the key enhancements with this generation of StoreEasy is its ability to keep pace with data growth.

“We have made it easier to provision, and enhanced deduplication and compression to maximize usable space,” Bacon said. New 10TB drive bundles provide 35 per cent greater density. This lets the HPE StoreEasy 1650 scale up to 280 TB of internal capacity in just 2U. It also enables administrators and channel partners to automatically receive notifications and recommendations when it is time to add additional capacity.

“We have also further hardened our security features,” Bacon added. “We have hardened it for ‘man in the middle attacks’ between the client and storage device, and also increased ‘data in flight’ encryption performance so it is up to twice as fast as before. In addition, while anti-malware has always been available to install, we now have malware protection enabled by default, although customers can use an alternative if they want.”

HPE StoreEasy can also now use native Microsoft integration to leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud as a backup target.

HPE also announced a more limited range of enhancements to its HPE Flex Solutions, a series of integrated technology packages. The changes are focused specifically on the solutions for Microsoft SQL Server, and feature new hybrid flash HPE MSA 2042 Storage systems and support for SQL Server 2016.

“We are refreshing our Flex solutions around SQL Server, including ones with the ML 150 tower server, and the DL 80 rack server,” Sung said.