India: HP has introduced a new family of entry-level disk arrays with enterprise-class features that can help customers more effectively centralize storage to lower costs, increase administrator efficiency and reduce business downtime.

The HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array (MSA2000) family is composed of low-cost Fibre Channel and iSCSI disk arrays for highly available, storage area networks (SAN), which is designed for virtualized server environments.

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

The entry-level external storage market was $ 2.8 billion in 2006, according to analysts, and HP garnered a market-leading 21 percent market share in this segment in 2007.

"HP's market strength and experience in the entry-level SAN segment allows them to deliver cost-effective solutions that provide high levels of availability and scalability," said John Webster, principal IT advisor, Illuminata  "There is a growing demand among customers with smaller storage needs for features to support high-profile data and applications, as well as deployments of virtual servers."

The MSA2000 arrays are easily deployed in physical or virtual server environments to deliver an available and automated infrastructure. New capabilities within the MSA2000 increase application uptime to better ensure that the systems are available for the business.

"Our modular storage arrays are perfect for customers who have a limited IT budget, but need a solution that is quickly scalable for shared storage environments," said Manoj Suvarna, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks Division, HP India. "Customers will benefit from consolidating their storage and can take advantage of features like snap and clone to protect their data and deliver value to their business."

To further minimize the risk of business interruption, the MSA2000 includes optional management software for "snap and clone" capabilities. These new data duplication capabilities are critical in protecting data and streamlining IT processes with rapid backup and recovery operations. This more reliable data protection also features a persistent cache that does not require a battery backup, thus reducing the potential disposal of hazardous material.

The flexible and modular nature of the HP StorageWorks portfolio eases the addition of file services to the MSA2000 family using HP ProLiant Storage Servers or an HP StorageWorks EFS Clustered Gateway. By leveraging familiar ProLiant server configuration and system management tools, minimal training is required for IT managers and administration is simplified.