BANGALORE, INDIA: Continuing with the expansion of its portfolio of entry level storage solutions, Hewlett Packard has launched a new suite of storage solutions that caters to the unique needs of midsize and growing businesses in India.

The HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4400) and HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array (MSA2000) offers a combination of high-performance and availability features, virtualization capabilities and advanced provisioning software that makes them ideal for midsize businesses who would like to cost-effectively manage large amounts of data in a SAN environment without investing in deep storage experience.

The HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA 4400) is an easy-to-manage virtual storage disk array that offers a combination of high-performance and availability features, virtualization capabilities and advanced provisioning software that makes it ideal for midsize businesses.

Addressing a press conference, Manoj Suvarna, country manager, HP StorageWorks Division said: "Other SAN environments typically create significant management overhead, but the powerfully simple EVA4400 is the better solution for midsize businesses since it is easier to configure and automates storage provisioning to improve capacity utilization."

The EVA4400 has key virtualization features previously available only on high-end arrays, but now at a price designed for midsize businesses. Specifically, the EVA4400 features a dual-redundant hardware architecture that supports local and remote replication software. This eliminates single points of failure and helps maximum uptime, he said.

The HP StorageWorks EVA4400 is powerful, simple and affordable. "With storage becoming ubiquitous, we are driving it to become simpler. It's up to 5X easier to manage than traditional disk arrays," Suvarna said.

The HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array (MSA2000), a new family of entry-level disk array, with enterprise-class features helps customers more effectively centralize storage to lower costs, increase administration efficiency and reduce business downtime.

The MSA 2000 family is composed of low-cost Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI disk arrays for highly available, storage area networks (SAN) that is designed for virtualized server environments.

The easy-to-use enterprise-class systems are designed for SMBs. However, enterprises will also find the MSA2000 is an ideal solution for their remote office, departmental, secondary and tertiary storage needs.

According to a recent survey of current and planned virtualization users by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, 28 percent surveyed said they planned to implement server virtualization in the next six months and 42 percent planned to deploy within the next three years, Suvarna added.

India will witness a growth of an average 16 to 18 percent in the storage space through the year 2011. While tape storage will witness single-digit growth, SAN storage will see a growth of 20 plus range, he said. According to an AMI report, last year, the total storage spend by Indian SMBs stood at $350M.

New research findings show that global midsized companies are looking for technology solutions designed to meet specific business needs. According to a research commissioned by HP, two-thirds of respondents said that their companies required solutions built for their company's size and business challenges.