Hewlett Packard Enterprise has updated its portfolio of pre-assembled solutions for businesses with up to 500 seats.
Like earlier members of the HPE Small Business Solutions family, which debuted last year, the new and enhanced offerings mix servers, storage, software, networking, and cloud capabilities in pre-validated, tested, and configured combinations designed to provide turnkey answers to common use cases.
“They’re 85 to 90 percent ready to go,” says Tim Peters, vice president and general manager of HPE’s Transactional SMB Group. They’re also sold exclusively through channel partners.
The latest Small Business Solutions, which are designed to provide more options and greater scalability to growing businesses, include a new version of HPE’s small office deployment package. Previously, that offering came in an edition for up to 25 employees and another for up to 50. The bigger version of the solution now targets organizations with as many as 100 users instead, and features an HPE StoreEasy 1660 SAS storage array, two Aruba 2530 switches, and five Aruba iAP 303 wireless access points.
“We’re expanding the storage capability as well as the networking so that people are adequately covered,” says Marc Semadeni, manager of SMB Solutions at HPE.
Like its predecessor, the solution comes with an HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 server. The smaller SKU, by contrast, features a ProLiant ML30 Gen10 server, an HPE OfficeConnect 1920s switch, and two OfficeConnect OC20 access points.
Small Business Solutions for file and backup services now come in three versions. A basic offering stores all data in one or more ProLiant Gen10 servers. “In many cases, these customers are very cost-conscious, so they will only buy one system,” Semadeni notes.
A second version tailored to offices with 10 to 100 users that wish to take data offsite includes an HPE RDX Backup System with removable cartridges in up to 4TB capacities. A third SKU optimized for file archiving features an HPE StoreEver MSL 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader that provides up to 240TB of storage.
“Tape is a thing that a lot of people think is past its prime, but we sell a boatload of tape,” Semadeni says. Tape is especially popular among customers that need to preserve large volumes of data inexpensively for regulatory compliance or other purposes, he adds.
Two “scalable storage” solutions target somewhat larger organizations. The first, aimed at sites with 50 to 150 employees, features an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 server and an HPE MSA 1050 storage array. The bigger one, for offices with 150 to 250 users, comes with an HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 server, an HPE MSA 2052 hybrid array, and an optional HPE OfficeConnect 1950 12XGT 4SF switch.
High-availability storage options, designed to support eight virtual machines per node, now pair HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers with either Microsoft Azure Stack or VMware vSAN software. “This is the poor man’s SAN,” Semadeni says.
A new version of the Small Business Solution for Virtualization, meanwhile, adds optional support for backup software from Veeam. “Veeam just provides an excellent backup and replication option for your VMs, whether they’re in Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware,” Semadeni says.
All products in the Small Business Solutions family are backed by optional Foundation Care services from HPE’s Pointnext unit. Partners can deliver operational support, proactive maintenance, advisory and professional services, and IT education services through that program. “The reseller can add additional value-added services too,” Peters notes, as well as cloud applications, line-of-business software, and other components.
Financing is available for Small Business Solutions through HPE Financial Services. Options include a subscription-based, “pay-as-you-grow” plan for users who wish to avoid steep upfront capital outlays when buying infrastructure. HPE lets customers exchange outdated older hardware for discounts on new systems too. “We can give them money if they return their old equipment,” Peters says.
Pricing on both new and existing Small Business Solutions is designed to be 10 to 15 percent less than comparable offerings from other hardware makers. “They’re priced very aggressively,” Peters says. “We benchmark ourselves weekly to what’s available in the market.”
HPE engineers its Small Business Solutions portfolio to provide what market research suggests SMBs most value in IT offerings, including comprehensive functionality, reliability, security, and efficiency.
“They want to be as efficient as they possibly can with all of their resources, the people in the company, the technology that they’re leveraging, as well as the financing for those different technologies,” says Robert Checketts, an SMB product marketing manager at HPE.
Above all, he continues, SMBs want simple systems that just work. “They don’t want to be afraid of IT, and sadly many of them are today.”
Small Business Solutions are designed to be simple for partners to sell as well. “We really work hard to make this an end-to-end and easy and frictionless way to do business,” Peters says, noting that every SKU in the portfolio is pulled from stock.
“You can grab it that day,” he says. “There’s no going to the factory and building it.”
In addition to its small business solutions, HPE offers consumption-based solutions for somewhat bigger businesses through its GreenLake Flex Capacity program.
