HPE MSA Gen 6 for Small Businesses With Entry-Level Hybrid Flash Solution

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) announced the next gen of the Modular Smart Array (MSA), MSA Gen 6, helping SMBs focus on growing their business with an entry-level hybrid-flash storage solution that delivers performance and automation for tight budgets ⁽¹⁾.

In today’s digital-first economy, technology spending is limited for most SMBs. With MSA, they can preserve cash with an updated entry storage solution that continues to get better with new data services and a modern architecture. It also allows them to ensure their most valuable data is secure and easily accessible by employees, no matter where they are working from. Through its new data services and a modernized architecture, MSA enables customers who run on-demand businesses – like media streaming and online education – to manage their distributed applications and workloads more easily.

“The HPE MSA is ideal for the clients we serve whose businesses require a reliable, simple and low-cost storage solution that can match today’s workloads, and scale as their performance and capacity needs grow,” said Sky Cumming, product manager, Dicker Data Ltd, an Australian IT distributor and HPE channel partner. “The auto tiering capabilities provide the performance needed to power their applications, and the archive storage provides a flexible enterprise-grade storage solution at an entry-level price point. The new HPE MSA Health Check tool protects vs. attacks and predicts failures before they happen so small businesses can focus on making their business thrive without an IT headache.“

Advancements to MSA Gen 6 architecture
Updates to MSA deliver benefits that help to meet the needs of SMBs, including automatic tiering for faster data access, an improved MSA Health Check tool that eliminates common causes of downtime, and integration with HPE Cloud Volumes backup for cloud backup and data archival.

The features include:

• Hands-free tiering that delivers workload efficiency with improved performance and lower latencies. This feature boosts delivered performance by 2-4x compared to HDD drive -only configurations, and allows the array to respond to changing workloads utilizing a small amount of SSDs. This feature moves the hottest data to the fastest media in real-time, allowing customers to more maximize SSD performance and HDD capacity based on workload needs.

• Level of in-array data protection with the MSA Data Protection Plus (MSA DP+). This protection capability spans all drives, and eliminates idle HDD spares to improve overall system efficiency and performance. In the event of a drive failure, MSA DP+ would speed rebuild times by 25x ⁽²⁾, minimizing the time the array was in a degraded or vulnerable state.

• Improved MSA Health Check tool that eliminates common causes of downtime. With this tool, data shows that 76% of MSA support calls will be eliminated for customers who utilize the MSA Health Check functionality proactively. This cloud-base tool reduces local administration overhead by searching sensor data for known issues, and adherence to best practices, improving the user experience and maximizing availability.

• Integration with Cloud Volumes Backup to provide customers a simple and inexpensive route to cloud-based data protection, while saving money on a separate backup appliance. SMBs can instantly start backing up to the cloud with Cloud Volumes Backup, a built-in enterprise cloud backup service using Recover Manager Central, without changing any existing backup workloads. Cloud Volumes Backup cloud services are also now available through the company’s GreenLake.

“HPE has continually built on and refined the MSA product family for six gens, focusing on the balance between performance and affordability, as well as looking at the simplicity and customer experience,” said Chris Powers, VP and GM, big data and collaborative platform development, HPE. “HPE MSA is helping SMBs by delivering the performance and automation they need to keep their businesses running. We take pride in providing our customers with a reliable and fast solution at an affordable price so that their businesses can serve their clients efficiently.“

The company has a portfolio of solutions for SMBs, including the recently announced monthly subscription service for secure, easy-to-use IT solutions through the firm’s channel partners, and the MicroServer, providing a small office-in-a-box solution for a complete small office technology foundation.

Pricing and availability:
The MSA Gen 6 is available for order direct and through channel partners starting under $7,000.

Resources:
MSA Gen 6 DS
Blog: Introducing HPE MSA Gen6 Storage: Hands-Free, High Performance, and Simpler than Ever

⁽¹⁾ MSA Gen 6 price as compared to MSA Gen 5, delivering 45% more performance
⁽²⁾ Validated through internal testing at HPE Labs, 2020

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