Technology giant HewlettPackard (HP) reiterated its commitment to the small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) market by coming up with a strategy that brings together solutions and services to help SMBs better manage their storage environment.

Called Simply StorageWorks, this framework by HP aims to address data storage challenges faced by many of today’s SMBs, who unlike large corporations that has extensive resources to develop longterm storage strategies, are confronted with the unique challenge of bridging the gap between their ever-increasing data storage requirements and the capabilities of their IT infrastructure as they grow their businesses.

The need for good storage solutions has become more and more imperative than ever for SMBs nowadays primarily due to the enormous volume of digital information being generated and the growing threat of competition. In order to stay competitive, a growing number of SMBs are deploying storage-intensive technologies such as customer relationship management, software configuration management, enterprise resource planning and business intelligence, etc. However, because of the lack of expertise as well as budgetary constraints, SMBs are faced with the difficult task of managing the environment. Choosing the type of storage technology alone can be a tough decision to make for these companies.

Denise Marcilio, HP director, volume business development, StorageWorks division, said Simple StorageWorks, has been designed based on the key priorities of SMBs to match both business and storage priorities.

"Simply StorageWorks will help SMBs meet customer satisfaction, control expenses, grow top-line revenue and reach new markets. In addition, the solutions will also provide continuity and disaster recovery, capacity planning for growth, and data management and storage tiering."

She sumps up Simply StorageWorks into three main parts: Simply Storage Consolidation, which is shared storage for file serving and application data; Simply Business Protection, which is for reliable backup and recovery for business continuity; and Simply Business Solutions, which is storage optimized for speecific IT and application.

Marcilio points out that all Simply StorageWorks solutions have been designed from the ground up and not just simplified versions of the enterprise storage solutions, because their is no solution that fits all. "All of these solutions are customized to meet the specific needs of SMBs."

Meanwhile, Stephan Schmitt, HP vice-president of marketing, StorageWorks division, said as SMBs grow and evolve their businesses, HP is able to help them meet their data storage management challenge with solutions that are not just merely a proactive approach but more importantly one that is strategic.

To do this, Schmitt said: "First, you can improve efficiency by consolidating storage into a centralized and high performance storage arrays and file/print serving solutions. Second, because data is the lifeblood of today’s business, you must ensure that data is both safe and secure. Moving towards multi-tier backup strategies that utilizes both disk and tape can vastly improve recovery points and recovery times.

HP officials said Simply StorageWorks helps SMBs to manage huge volumes of unstructured data and move to a virtual server or clustered server environment with the exponential increase of storage volumes and high storage management costs driving this.

According to Charles Vallhonrat, HP’s product marketing manager, entrylevel storage area network, StorageWorks division, today only about 30 per cent of storage space is being used on the average server. Through consolidation, he said, SMBs will get more value from their storage investments because storage utilization can be raised to at least 50 per cent. "Companies cannot afford to manage and have individual storage for every application, thus the need to consolidate."