Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is set to announce a new storage product line Monday 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.
By consolidating the offerings under a single product line, HP will simplify things for its customers and resellers, said 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 said.
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.
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,” said 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.”
Pricing for the 14-drive MSA30 storage enclosure will start at US$3,200. The MSA500 will start at US$5,700, and the MSA1000 SAN starts at US$9,995. The prices do not include the cost of the 36GB, 72GB, and 146GB hard drives that HP sells with these systems.
