HP Ships Small Business Storage

StorageWorks line is repackaged, repriced for small and midsize businesses.

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Hewlett-Packard is announcing this week a new storage product line aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. The StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family will be made up of existing HP products, repackaged and rebranded to make them more appealing to smaller companies.

The product line will consist of the MSA30, formerly known as the StorageWorks 4400, the MSA500, formerly known as the Smart Array Cluster System, and the MSA1000, which had been called the StorageWorks Modular SAN Array 1000.

Pricing for the 14-drive MSA30 storage enclosure will start at $3200. The MSA500 will start at $5700, and the MSA1000 SAN starts at $9995. The prices do not include the cost of the hard drives that HP sells with these systems. Drives are available in configurations ranging from 36GB to 146GB.

Simple Package

By consolidating the storage offerings under a single product line, HP will simplify things for its customers and resellers, says Janet Waxman, vice president of systems and storage channels and alliance research at IDC. "They're repackaging something that was kind of confusing people," she says.

HP will also now offer ProLiant systems pre-configured with the MSA direct-attach and storage area network (SAN) systems.

"Instead of selecting up to a dozen different options, now there's one skew they can go to," says Paul Miller, HP's vice president of marketing for industry-standard servers. "It really simplifies the front end of the ordering process as well as the deployment of these servers."