Canadian businesses, the bulk of which are mid-sized, may benefit from Hewlett Packard’s launch of data centre technology specifically designed for the mid market – products the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said won’t be the usual “watered down enterprise solutions”.
HP announced Wednesday the newest member of its BladeSystem series, the HP BladeSystem c3000 enclosure for smaller sites, branch offices and remote locations. Along with it came the HP StorageWorks All-in-One SB600c Storage Blade (for use in c3000 and c7000) with backup, archiving and disaster recovery capabilities. The products began shipping same day at $4,944 and $11,424 for the BladeSystem and storage blade, respectively.
The mid market is a critical market segment for HP that is fast expanding, said Ann Livermore, executive vice-president for HP’s technology solutions group, during a keynote. “They have a unique set of IT needs that have not been served well.”
The products respond to mid market companies’ need to cut costs, time and power, along with the requirement for technology that is easily deployed, managed and reliable, said Livermore.
As well, c3000 is built to survive the “harsh environments” that are often characteristic of mid-sized businesses, such as factory floors, warehouses, and in temperatures of up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, said Paul Miller, vice-president of marketing, enterprise storage and servers. Besides those specific mid-market benefits, Miller said the BladeSystem’s break-even point is reduced to three to five servers, effectively making it more cost-effective for mid-sized businesses to purchase the BladeSystem vis-à-vis the traditional rack mount.
Mid market businesses do need the incentive of a lower break-even point to purchase such technologies, especially considering they tend to expand incrementally, said William Terrill, associate senior research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.
“There is an upfront cost. If you only buy a couple of servers at a time there is a higher cost to the blade servers versus the rack mount,” said Terrill. “[Mid market businesses] don't have a huge amount of resource to put into innovation. They live day to day in many circumstances."
According to an Info-Tech study, enterprises are the biggest users of blade servers given their requirements for space and power. Small companies rank just behind enterprises because buying a single blade system will usually cover all their needs. Mid-sized companies, however, were not yet purchasers of the technology.
While the breakeven point for mid-market customers is still not as low as, say two servers, it’s still a significantly smaller barrier of entry, said HP’s Urs Renggli, director of worldwide small and mid market business for the technology solutions group.
“It’s not just about the price of actually buying a product, it’s seeing how more efficient they’re going to be, and many more things they can do. And at the end, how much more competitive they’re going to be in the marketplace,” he said, adding it’s a small enough number to, at the very least, get customers interested in blade servers.
HP will keep company with Dell in the mid market blade server space, said Terrill. Although it’s been Dell’s primary focus, he said, the company keeps telling its clients that blades aren’t suited for everybody. "And quite honestly, blades are simply a new form factor. It's an evolution.”
The technology, said Terrill, has evolved from tower servers, to more compact and power efficient rack mounts, and now to blade servers.