HPE enhances six of their SMB solutions, to provide more customer choice and provide additional performance and capacity.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced enhancements to half a dozen solutions in their HPE Small Business Solutions portfolio, with the general theme of adding additional capability and support options, particularly to address more robust use cases that smaller businesses will face.
The target market for these solutions is the sub-250 solution space, with HPE believing that companies above that size tend to be more likely to respond to enterprise messaging.
“From 25 to 250 customers is the sweet spot for these, with the bundles sized right for different points within this spectrum,” said Tim Peters, vice president and general manager, Transactional SMB Group, HPE. “We have done everything we can to simplify and automate things and make it easy to take care of them, including providing both storage and backup and recovery components within the solutions.”
With ‘Enterprise’ displayed prominently in its fairly recently selected company name, HPE remains eager to display its bona fides to the SMB market.
“HPE has been doing SMB for over 25 years, and we are still very much in the small business space,” said Robert Checketts, product marketing manager of SMB, HPE. Checketts said that HPE researched what SMBs wanted with these products thoroughly, including studying analyst surveys, taking with partners, and getting feedback from things like the SpiceWorks Community.
“SMBs are looking for three major things,” he said. “They know they need new technologies, but are afraid of them and don’t want to be. They also want to be secure, and they want to get the best quality. These solutions address these things. They have all been secured, tested and validated.”
HPE Small Business Solutions for Small Office Deployment, first introduced last October, has been expanded. Initially designed to support up to 25 users and 50 simultaneously connected devices, its capacity, and storage capability, has been upgraded
“We are adding expanded storage to the configuration, with an HPE StoreEasy 1660 NAS appliance, which has been tested and validated,” said Marc Semadeni, manager of SMB Solutions, HPE. “Tested and validated with the expanded storage, it now supports up to 100 employees.” It now supports up to 200 devices, by using twice as many Aruba network switches and Wi-Fi access points.
HPE Small Business Solutions for File and Backup is another upgraded solution.
“This one was originally launched last March,” Semadeni said. “Now we are adding an external backup option and a file backup option. An RDX external disk is the recommended option for the external backup. For the file archive, it’s a StoreEver tape autoloader, which provides up to 240TB of storage. This now protects 50-250 employees.”
Semadeni said that tape is generally used in this part of the market for compliance cases specifically.
“There are still some old guard legacy small businesses that have always used tape, but today the main market is ones with compliance issues,” he said. “Tape is selling very well for us.”
HPE Small Business Solutions for Scalable Storage was initially configured for 50–150 employees, with an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 server, and an MSA 1050 SAN. It now supports 150-250 employees with a pair of HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 servers, and an MSA 2052 SAN. OfficeConnect 1950 12XGT 4SF access points are optional.
“The real crux of this storage push is the MSA products, with the new part being the bundle,” Semadini said
HPE Small Business Solutions for High Availability Storage now has expanded options as well. It is based on HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 and originally came with VMware vSAN software. A Microsoft Azure Stack HCI option has now been added.
HPE Small Business Solutions for Virtualization, originally introduced last March, combines HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers with either VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V.
“What is new here is an option to add Veeam Enterprise Backup and Replication,” Semadini said.
HPE Small Business Solutions for Hybrid Database, which combines a ProLiant server with Microsoft Azure services to provide for automatic replication to the cloud, has also been updated.
“Solutions for Hybrid Database, which was launched last fall, now supports SQL Server and Azure,” Semadini stated.
HPE sees these all as basically channel solutions. HPE Pointnext consumption-based services, which were opened up to partners last year, are available for these offerings, as is the Smart Buy Express offers that HPE introduced last year.
“Smart Buy Express is highly discounted for partners, and is bundled together to optimize price on a very no-touch model,” Peters said.
Peters also stressed the suitability of HPE’s Power 5 model to these solutions. Its five Ps – Product for SMBs, aggressive Price positioning, configuration flexibility in the Process, Placement of focused leads with partners, and Promotion to amplify demand generation – are all designed to push channel presence in the SMB space.
“Partners like Power 5, because these allow them to deliver the right capability and use case to the right customer,” Peters stated.
