HPE MSA: Simplified and scalable storage for SMEs

Much the same as their enterprise counterparts, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) spend a lot of time juggling trade-offs in their IT environments, between budget, performance, and ease of use. Unfortunately, budgets are either flat or on the decline, forcing them to do more with a lot less. 

Technology and human resources are both bearing the brunt of financial restraints and are putting these businesses under pressure to find cost-effective solutions that provide meaningful enhancements in terms of performance and automation to help them stay ahead of the competition. 

At the same time, smaller entities are finding that their existing storage solutions simply can’t keep up. Yesterday’s storage was not designed to handle either the data volumes or the complexity of today’s cloud world. 

Covered in this article

Stifling business growth
Evolving infrastructure
Simple, fast, affordable
Hybrid-flash storage
Expand while growing

Stifling business growth

Older storage systems lack the flexibility, agility, and scalability that is needed to support the needs of modern businesses. This in turn limits growth, as companies find it difficult to adapt to evolving customer needs. 

Similarly, outdated technology, combined with the lack of centralised data storage, makes it harder for businesses to get accurate and relevant data for informed decision-making. 

Finally, because outdated or legacy storage systems are characterised by their inflexibility, they hamper innovation and with that, business growth. They lack the ability to support new operational models, modern infrastructure, which prevents companies from testing innovative initiatives and taking them further.

Instead of focusing on core activities, SMEs end up spending too much time troubleshooting performance or availability issues in a reactive and time-consuming manner.

Evolving infrastructure

The bottom line? SMEs have too much data to process, store, and use, and lack the visibility that enables them to say with certainty what can be discarded without compromising security or compliance regulations. They need IT infrastructures that can evolve consistently, and grow alongside the business to take advantage of any new market opportunities that present themselves.

Fortunately, the HPE’s Modular Smart Array (MSA) portfolio of storage solutions offers the IT infrastructure that SMEs need to address these challenges.

Brought to South Africa by Tarsus Distribution, the HPE MSA range offers three major advantages for SMEs looking to deploy SAN-based storage. Firstly, they can benefit from affordable acceleration to hybrid-flash storage. SMEs also get real performance that they can see and experience, as well as proven simplicity in deploying and managing storage resources.

 HPE MSA Storage brings a simple, intuitive user interface with guided workflows for configuration and setup, and boasts up to 80% performance improvement when compared to the previous generation of HPE MSA Storage arrays. Importantly, these solutions are highly affordable, promising one of the lowest costs per GB in HPE’s entire portfolio.

Simple, fast, affordable

First in the range, the HPE MSA 2060 Storage is a flash-ready hybrid storage system purpose-built to deliver easy-to-use, affordable application acceleration for mid-sized businesses as well as remote office deployments.  

The HPE MSA 2062 Storage offers users a mixture of simplicity, flexibility, and a range of excellent, advanced features that SMEs would not expect to find in an entry-level priced storage solution.

Next on the list, the HPE MSA 1060 was designed to meet entry-level storage requirements and is an ideal fit for customers who are working within a tight budget. New sixth-generation HPE MSA storage architecture, in terms of both hardware and software, this solution provides a modernised hardware platform, crammed full of resources for features that include Automated Tiering v2.0 that optimises input/output per second (IOPS) by a staggering 45% in comparison to the fifth-generation range.

In addition, it provides a new RAID protection scheme (MSA-DP+), a new task-optimised web interface, and highly optimised data management via a new RESTful interface. Its new disk group type increases availability, significantly reduces RAID rebuild times, boosts performance, and simplifies setup by eliminating the power of two requirements and automatically handling spares. It also provides a more granular expansion of disk pools.

Hybrid-flash storage

Finally, for those SMEs wanting to start with a hybrid flash storage configuration, the HPE MSA 2062 solution is the perfect solution. Combining an HPE MSA 2060 with two preinstalled 1.92 TB SSDs and an HPE MSA Advanced Data Services license, HPE MSA 2062 offers dramatic savings for those customers that are wanting to start with a tiered storage solution from day one.

With this option, budget and performance are easily balanced, as SMEs can start small and add capacity as needed with any combination of solid-state drives (SSDs), high-performance enterprise serial-attached SCSI solid-state drive (SAS HDD), or low-cost midline SAS HDDs. 

Expand while growing

The HPE MSA portfolio enables SMEs to expand as their IT grows with a flexible, modular architecture that enables future growth and supports large form factor (LFF) and small form factor (SFF) expansion enclosures to grow storage capacity as required.

Whether an SME is in the market for a new data storage solution, seeking a simple refresh, or grappling with excessive complexity in their existing storage infrastructure, HPE MSA Gen6 arrays offer a tailored solution to accommodate every requirement and financial constraint.

If you need help with your storage, contact Tarsus Distribution.