HP Rolls Out New Products, Services Aimed At SMBs

“We started out as the quintessential SMB. We still like to think that our origins are here,” said Dan Tindall, vice president of Worldwide Channel Development in HP’s Solution Provider Organization (SPO), referring to HP’s origins in co-founder Dave Packard’s garage in Palo Alto, Calif.

The company, still headquartered in Palo Alto, may have grown quite a bit since its founding by Packard and Bill Hewlett in 1939, “but SMB is in our DNA,” Tindall said during press conference at HP’s briefing center just down the road in Cupertino.

The newly introduced products span the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant’s broad portfolio of PCs, servers, storage systems, networking hardware, printing products and the software that manages them. Together with some repurposed enterprise-class products, a big chunk of the new product lineup represents HP’s goal of spreading its Converged Infrastructure message to the largest commercial accounts in the world down to small and medium businesses.

To that end, HP introduced new storage and networking products aimed at SMBs that it said would “provide a blueprint for deploying technology to achieve new levels of integration.”

On the storage front, the new HP StorageWorks X310 Data Vault is a $549 tower offering up to seven terabytes of internal expansion and up to 15TB of expansion via external disk drives. The unit provides automated, daily backup for up to 10 PCs and runs the Windows Home Server operating system.

Another new product, the HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA), uses 6-GB SAS technology to double storage capacity and throughput over previous generations of the product, HP said, while an enhanced lineup of StorageWorks X1000 Network Storage Systems for merging groups of direct-attached storage onto a shared network platform now come in rack-mount, blade and tower flavors.

The P2000 G3 MSA dual-controller arrays start at $8,970, with the associated MSA FC SAN starter kits priced at $16,500. HP’s X1000 NAS systems are priced at $3,512.

New networking products included the HP V1410 Switch Series, repurposed for SMBs from the existing HP ProCurve 1400 family of switches. The V1410 lineup offers preconfigured 8-, 16- and 24-port options while serving up a 451 percent return on investment, according to the vendor.

HP’s SMB-targeted enhancements to the V-Series, which also includes V1405, V1905 and V1910 switches, as well as HP V110 Wireless N routers, provide support for such business applications as VoIP, mobile computing and what HP has dubbed Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC).

Perhaps with rival Cisco’s own Unified Communications portfolio firmly in mind, HP spent a good deal of time Wednesday pitching its new UCC products for SMBs. These included everything from HP 48Upper, a social networking-inspired collaborative platform for IT professionals at mid-sized organizations, to a comprehensive new UCC initiative by HP and Microsoft to streamline instant messaging, video and voice across entire organizations.

HP also had a new marketing product for SMBs hoping to impress investors, customers, employees and their local communities with their green credentials. The HP Sustainability Reporting tool helps SMBs put together reports on their carbon savings and other environmentally friendly benefits from using -- you guessed it -- HP computing products.