Midsizewize - The SMB/Midmarket Server & Storage Blog by Urs Renggli

Microsoft Essential Business Server news from Microsoft's EBS Team Blog

Urs Renggli — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Earlier this week I was attending Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) that happend to be in my hometown - Houston Texas.

Microsoft announced the Release Candidate 1 of EBS - Essential Business Server that is solidly targeted at Midsize Businesses at the WPC.

I found an interesting blog entry from Microsoft's EBS Team Blog that I wanted to share with you:

The Worldwide Partner Conference wrapped up today with 4 days of great info for thousands of Microsoft Partners (mostly VARs & VAPs). Essential Business Server was demoed and referred to throughout the conference. For people who weren't able to attend, some of the events were recorded or have web sites. Here's a quick recap of some of the happenings.

The big news from WPC was that we announced Release Candidate 1 of EBS and demoed it live for the first time publicly. Several of the talks that included EBS demos were recorded, including:

A remote access, management and licensing demo in a talk by Microsoft Vice President Mike Risse (SMB Revenue growth and the product roadmap - Click here, mouse over "Keynotes" and select the SMB revenue growth keynote)
A security and reliability demo in a talk by General Manager Larry Orecklin (Transforming IT through the Core Infrastructure Model - - Click here, mouse over "Keynotes" and select the Transforming IT keynote)

In addition, there was a high interest talk on how to choose which product is right for your company - Small Business Server or Essential Business Server. If you'd like to see this talk, - Click here, mouse over "breakouts" and select the "SMB Server Platform - Which is right for your customer?")

There were plenty of interesting things to see, including the HP C3000 - a blade system sized perfectly for the mid market. We showed this off in several of our keynotes and saw a lot of people wearing HP USB Wristbands (where will they think to put a USB key next ;-) ) with the www.EBSandC3000.com URL on it walking around.

Several of the media and roaming video blogging/video sites were there doing interview on all the news, including Joey Snow from Technet Edge who did this short interview with Joel Sider on some of the EBS announcements.

There was a lot more that happened today that will likely go online soon, but I wanted to get this up there so no one was left out of all the recent happenings.

- Eric Watson, Group Program Manager

PS - a couple more news tidbits have hit the web from WPC

The following video from VarVid is a great interview of the HP C3000 midsize blade system that I talked about in 3 of my keynotes: http://www.varvid.com/2008/07/the-hp-c3000-an.html

And there is another short interview with me: http://www.varvid.com/2008/07/eric-watson-fro.html

and a number of writes ups in various online news magazines (here's a quick sampling):

eweek http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Apps/Microsoft-Gears-up-for-Mid-Market-Server-Blitz/

IT Web (TAP customer write up) http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/software/2008/0807030807.asp?A=SBC&S=Servers%20and%20Server-Based%20Computing&O=FPIN

Search Win IT: http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid1_gci1319958,00.html#

Source:→ EBS Team Blog

Synchronize your IT and Business

Urs Renggli — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:18:00 GMT

To remain competitive in today’s marketplace, midsized businesses must quickly and efficiently adapt their IT to changing business requirements. In connection with this, virtualization and consolidation stand in the foreground.

The necessity to synchronize IT to create value in the company, prompts new questions: What contribution does IT make for increasing the results of the company? How can your midsize business, with the help of IT, achieve sales volume and profit growth, optimize cash flow and lower operating costs?

The greatest challenge for medium-sized companies, however, are the changes in the market that take place in ever shorter interval cycles and closely influenced by economic globalization. Businesses need to react quickly to changing business conditions and need a strategy, which backs adaptive technologies and the processes people ascribe to.

The transition from information technology to business technology is an important step on the way to simplify complex IT environments also for midsized businesses. Applications and infrastructures are consolidated, processes automated and resources combined together. This needs to be accompanied by replacing proprietary solutions with systems that are based on industry standards. With that, infrastructure management is simplified and companies can react faster to changing demands. This helps that IT delivers peak potential of the required resources and business critical applications and also high service potential.

Have you synchronzed IT with your business? Do you have any learnings you would want to share? Let us know?

Urs

Data Deduplication - Eliminate redundant backup data!

Urs Renggli — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:02:00 GMT

A key challenge midsized businesses share with enterprises is the need to reduce the cost of protecting their data. Various storage technologies have made backing up data more affordable. For example, data compression has allowed more data to be stored on disk-based storage systems as well as tape cartridges.One of the most significant new storage technologies is data deduplication. This backup technique eliminates redundant data from storage, by saving a single copy of identical data and replacing any further instances with pointers back to that one copy.

We can all relate to the proliferation of email and the backup costs associated with protecting and retaining company email messages. As an example, consider the scenario where 500 people receive a company-wide email message with a 1 megabyte attachment. If each recipient saves that attachment locally, it is replicated 500 times when those desktops are backed up—consuming 499 MB more backup space than necessary. Data deduplication backs up just one instance of the attachment's data and replaces the other 499 instances with pointers back to that copy.

HP just a few days ago announced several new disk-based storage systems specifically designed to meet the needs of different business environments. For midmarket customers, HP is radically changing the economics of data protection in smaller business environments and remote offices 45% less cost than comparable products:

The HP StorageWorks D2D2500 Backup System automates daily backup in a 1U rack disk-based storage solution of up to 6 servers retaining up to 50x more backup data on the same disk for cost-effective backup and fast data recovery. The HP StorageWorks D2D4000 Backup System automates daily backup in a 2U rack disk-based storage solution of up to 16 servers retaining up to 50x more backup data on the same disk for cost-effective backup and fast data recovery.Read more about our announcement: www.hp.com/go/deduplicationAs always, let me know if you have any questions or comments.Warm regards,

Urs

Powering the Cloud ...

Urs Renggli — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:35:00 GMT

A few days ago I was interested to see a press release from our friends at SAVVIS, which includes the following statement:

“SAVVIS announced the availability of a hosted infrastructure platform for the SAP Business All-in-One solution. The SAVVIS solution targets mid-market customer segments and provides complete hosted IT infrastructure optimized to run SAP Business All-in-One. It is available exclusively through SAP channel partners authorized to resell SAP Business All-in-One and provides a low-cost, high-performance environment on which to deploy SAP applications.”

To see get the complete story, click here (http://www.savvis.net/corp/News/Press+Releases/Archive/) and click on the “SAVVIS Announces Hosting Relationship with SAP America, Inc.” press release.

There is a lot of hype about “cloud” technologies at the moment with just about everything being available as a service, or “*aaS” as some are calling it, but the SAVVIS announcement is interesting to me in two ways.

Firstly I think it’s cool that midsize customers can now take advantage of a very robust, powerful app like SAP’s All-in-One without having to make significant uprfront investments to get it; and secondly I think it’s really cool that they are running the service on our very own HP BladeSystem c3000, affectionately known as Shorty, which was specifically designed to meet the needs of midsize businesses.

HP together with SAP has done a lot of integration work over past months to ensure that SAP's Business All in one runs best on our Server and Storage Products. This integration work is delivered as so called Solution Blocks. With the HP Solution Block for SAP Business All in One customers get the right mix of of hardware and software allowing them to gain optimal utilization of your Server and Storage Infrastructure running your applications.

Obviously, we are very happy that many customers choose to buy your own Shorty-based SAP Business All-in-One solution, but if you prefer to buy it as a service from a “cloud” provider like SAVVIS, it’s great to know that it is powered by HP.

Market analysts IDC (www.idc.com) say that midsize firms mostly prefer to have their own in-house solutions to buying key apps as a service, yet SaaS is a fast-growing segment. We’d like to know what you think – is “cloud computing” something you’d consider? Are you using it already? If so, what results have you seen?

Cheers,

Urs

Click here to see the HP SAP All-in_One solution block data sheet http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-6651ENW.pdf

Click here to go to our midsize business solutions page on hp.com, which contains details of our midsize business solutions

http://www.hp.com/sbso/serverstorage/partnerships-mid-sized.html

Click here to go to our Shorty page on hp.com

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/enclosures/c-class/c3000/?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Why Storage Virtualisation?

Urs Renggli — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Continuing the discussion on virtualisation for midsize businesses, knowing how important it is to you all, today I’d like to cover an area that is often overlooked – your data storage.

I consistently hear from our midsize customers that they are facing ever-increasing challenges in the storage arena, not least of which are the proliferation of data, poor storage utilization and power and cooling inefficiencies.

Add to this the lengthy time it can take to deploy solutions, increasing IT costs and difficulties with disaster recover planning (some businesses still don’t have a DR plan), and you have a perfect case for virtualizing your storage.

The benefits come in three key ways – greater agility, lower cost and mitigating risk. If you are doing an infrastructure refresh it pays to introduce leading edge technologies such as blades, Virtual Connect and Virtual Storage to enhance your ability to adapt to change. This translates into capitalizing faster on business opportunities.

Cost is lowered through physical device consolidation, so less technology is needed to do a better job, as well as through the efficiencies that enhanced manageability that virtualisation and automation can deliver. You would also see an improvement in IT service levels (IT supporting the business with greater application uptime and access to information), getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Mitigation of risk is achieved with enhanced backup and disaster recovery capabilities that come with a virtualised environment, as well as through the ability to respond faster to change. This gives you edge over the huge enterprises that take forever to make adjustments in the face of changing business conditions.

Virtual Storage

One critical area of the storage environment where virtualisation can play a major role is with your disk arrays. That’s why HP developed the Enterprise Virtual Array. The latest model in the family is the EVA 4400, which was developed specifically with the needs of midsize businesses in mind.

The EVA provides tremendous benefits as a result of virtualisation, such as high availability, data protection and replication (Local replication with Snapshots and remote site to site replication with Continuous Access) and simpler, easier management with all your data represented in one pool of virtualised storage capacity. Of course you also get improved capacity utilization and faster rebuild times.

For more on the EVA 4400, click below:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/eva4400/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

We’d like to know whether you have implemented storage virtualisation. Are you seeing the same benefits I’ve outlined here? Do you have any advice to offer others who may be considering it? Let us know.

Cheers,

Urs

The PC is still personal – virtually…

Urs Renggli — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:57:00 GMT

Continuing our discussions on the theme of virtualization, this time I would like to talk about bringing it to the desktop.The personal computer is the de-facto productivity tool of white collar workers all over the world. The mainstream model today is one PC per user. However, as you experience every day in your businesses, this poses increasing management and risk challenges. The ongoing user support and maintenance, security breaches and remediation, data loss, power and cooling costs for underutilized PC's, etc continue to be headaches for many organizations especially midsize businesses.

But there is a better way. With a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), it is possible to host desktops inside virtual machines running centralized servers in the data center with users accessing their virtual desktops remotely from a thin client, repurposed computer, or even a handheld device.

Desktop virtualization technology, by the way, is not only for large corporations, especially if you have a small number of IT staff like most midsize customer have, VDI can be of great benefit in ensuring the few folks you have in your IT department don’t have to spend most of their times taking care of keeping PC’s up and running and up to date. Benefits can be considerable and include improved security because VDI (http://www.hp.com/sbso/serverstorage/partnerships-mid-sized/computing/virtualization.html) enables the movement of sensitive data usually resident on client devices into a centrally managed environment. Support is also streamlined as deployment; management and maintenance are all performed centrally. The lower management and maintenance overhead reduces total cost of ownership as well.

Have you thought about virtualizing your client pc’s? If so, what was your experience? Would you recommend it?

New HP Blog Platform coming ...

Urs Renggli — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:53:00 GMT

I wanted to let you know that HP blogs will be migrating to a new platform over the next week. As of tomorrow, May 23, I won't be posting to my blog and won't be able to receive any comments submitted. Please hold your comments until June 1 when our new site will be live.

Avoiding disaster the easy (and cost efficient) way

Urs Renggli — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:12:00 GMT

Avoiding disaster the easy way

Last time I talked about virtualization and it is such a big topic I’d like to continue that conversation by looking at another aspect of it.

With over 80% of business processes running on technology these days, it is not surprising to hear that many midsize businesses consider disaster recovery as one of the top priorities to address.

The business impact of data loss and operational downtime is significant because it often goes beyond the immediate financial loss and may have a long lasting negative effect on trust and credibility.

Despite this, there are still many midsize businesses that do not have a sound disaster recovery process in place. Sometimes this is because the resources for setting up and managing a disaster recovery site can be quite daunting, and some businesses feel it would require specialist technology expertise that they don’t have.

But it doesn’t have to be that hard. Our engineers have suggested an easier way using simple virtualization. For example, how about an approach whereby a disaster recovery site replicates the production environment by virtualizing a single server into multiple virtual machines and using storage mirroring technology to ensure continuous data replication and application failover? I am sure you are planning to replace some not up to the task servers with newer state of the art servers sometime in the near future. This is a good opportunity to take your older servers and virtualize so that they can be used as a very cost effective disaster recovery solutions.

Do you think an approach like this would work in your environment? Have you tried something similar already? Let us know.

Have you virtualized?

Urs Renggli — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:04:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days at the Midsize Enterprise Summit, an event that hosts a few hundred midsize business CIO’s and it was very obvious in my talks to many of the attendees that virtualization is absolutely top of mind in the midmarket.

How about you, are you thinking of doing so? Virtualization is also indicated to be one of the major technology investment areas for midsize businesses in 2008 based on some broader research that we have done over the past months and it’s no surprise when you consider the benefits.

Most servers are operating well below their capacity, some with utilization of only 10%, so it makes sense to pool them together into virtual machines. This delivers a considerable reduction in the number of servers needed, providing benefits on many fronts:

There is the obvious reduction in equipment expenses
Long term operating expenses also go down due to the management overhead savings
In some cases we’ve seen as much as a 10 to 1 reduction in server provisioning time (physical vs virtual)
Average power and cooling cost for a single processor are US$800 per year, so reducing them continuously adds to the bottom line over time

In many cases the savings in total cost of ownership can easily outweigh the cost of virtualization software.

Is this your experience? What benefits have you seen from consolidation using virtualization technology?

Eliminating Space Invaders

Urs Renggli — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:56:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet one of our customers in the Boston Area - Henry Chace, the CIO of Burns & Levinson, a 260 employee law firm, which has recently replaced its outdated IT infrastructure with state of the art HP ProLiant Servers.

While passing by his data center it was obvious that floor space was at a premium, as it is for many midsize businesses in city locations that don’t have the luxury of large out-of-town facilities.

Of course, Henry was delighted with the new levels of efficiency, security and continuity he was getting to help run the business but a major benefit of the upgrade was the giving back of expensive floor space that could be used for billable personnel.

Henry was able to reduce server space to just a couple of racks and by using the latest and greatest when it come to power and cooling in our ProLiant Servers, he also no longer needs the big cooling devices he used to run. So his energy bills are lower too.

This wasn’t Henry’s first infrastructure refresh with HP – three years ago the firm’s legacy were experiencing two to three crashes a week, vexing not only to the harried IT staff but infuriating to attorneys whose work would be halted mid-stride and to legal staff racing against court deadlines.

Along with downed servers, billable time would stop, time that could not be reclaimed, time during which Burns & Levinson was essentially not accessible to its clients and unable to provide the very services that are its business.

The new HP ProLiant Server infrastructure proved to be a smart investment, delivering an RoI of 894% with payback of 11 months.
If you want to learn more about what Henry has experienced please have a look at the link below that has some more details:
http://www.hp.com/sbso/serverstorage/article/burns-levinson.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

I wonder how many midsized companies like yourself consider space advantages when considering technology investments. Do you? Let us know.

Urs

What makes a commitment?

Urs Renggli — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Commitment is a word often used but seldom delivered on. A while back HP realised that midsize businesses have very different technology needs and priorities to small businesses or large enterprises, but that nobody seemed to be meeting those needs.

We know you need simple, affordable, reliable products and solutions, and that your technology imperatives include security, efficiency and business continuity. We also know that small-biz solutions don’t scale to your needs, while watered-down enterprise ones also fail to deliver on the promise.

So we instigated a program of designing from the ground up to meet the special needs of midsize technology infrastructures, making considerable investments in product development, channel enablement and marketing to address them.

Over the last 12 months alone we have introduced more server, storage and services offerings for midsize customers (the “midmarket” as we call it) than ever before:

2007:

March 27^th - Oracle/SQL Database midsize business solutions, HP ProLiant ML115 Server

April 10^th - StorageWorks AiO 1200 storage system

July 10^th - HP ProLiant DL180 server

Sept 12^th - C3000 BladeSystem Chassis (Shorty), BladeSystem Solutions Blocks, Midmarket solutions, AiO Storage Blade, Total Care for Midmarket

Nov 14^th - HPC for the midmarket, BladeSystem c3000 tower (Personal supercomputer)

2008:

January - HP ProLiant 100 series server portfolio, new midsize business solutions

February - New StorageWorks MSA2000 and EVA4400 product portfolio; Integrity Oracle midsize business solutions

Continuing the momentum

We have never been ones to rest on our laurels and I am happy to say that today we continued on this commitment with the announcement of new midsize solutions and products.

Recognizing that serving and retaining customers is top of mind for many of you and that the potential for Linux environments is hindered by complexity, we have produced new CRM solutions configurations for Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle Siebel; Oracle databases for Linux; and HP Insight Control Environment for easier management of Linux environments.

We also know that anywhere, anytime access to applications is important for productivity, so we have teamed with Citrix and Microsoft to offer a secure remote access solution that interfaces with a variety of access devices.

Of course we are continuing the introduction of technology products and are also bringing to market the world’s most affordable, power-efficient blade – the HP ProLiant BL260c, plus a new low-end server with new levels of affordability – the ProLiant DL 120 server.

Click here to read the press release - http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080331xa.html

To make it easy for you to find everything you need from HP from a single source we have updated the midsize business center on hp.com with information on IT infrastructure, personal computing and imaging and printing all in one place - www.hp.com/go/mediumbusiness

In it for the long term – continually assessing needs and delivering on meeting them. Now that’s what I call commitment.

Head to head array challenge: EVA4400 vs. DELL/EMC CX3-10

Urs Renggli — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:43:00 GMT

Hello,

In my last blog, I talked about virtualization and a new storage array. I just learned about an interesting test and wanted to talk more about it today.

Virtualisation has been a hot topic lately fueled by the popularity of server virtualisation. Storage virtualisation isn’t a new topic either. In fact, HP was one of the first vendors to offer virtualized disk arrays back in 1994. But a lot of confusion is out there over storage virtualisation – confusion that has been intensified by vendor hype. The vendor hype has in general over-promised and under-delivered.

I like what one industry analyst has said about storage virtualisation. According to John Webster, principal IT advisor at analyst firm Illuminata, "The single most important attribute of any storage virtualization solution is the ability to mask complexity and thereby make manageable that which is increasingly becoming unmanageable.”

The StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (or EVA) was designed to do exactly that – mask complexity. With the pricing of the new EVA4400 coming in up to 20% less than the EVA4100, we felt we had to do a better job of proving that indeed the EVA simplifies the management tasks of an administrator. We knew the lower pricing would spur interest by midsize customers who may have not considered the EVA family before.

Working with a third party, we brought several customers and their channel partner to Houston, Texas to put our ease of use claims to the test versus the DELL/EMC CX3-10 array. The customers had limited or no experience with midrange arrays from either vendor. While we weren’t surprised by the results, we were very pleased that these customers confirmed what we already knew about the EVA4400. You can read the paper titled “EVA4400 Challenge: Competitive Testing of Common Storage Administrative Tasks by The Edison Group “ or watch the HP StorageWorks EVA4400 challenge video. Let me just say that compared to traditional arrays like the CX3-10, the EVA will save you time and time is money!

If you thought storage virtualisation was only a technology for large enterprise customers, I think now would be a good time for you to reconsider, especially if you find that your storage capacity is growing and you need a solution that will simplify management of storage yet allow you to grow.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or if you have any comments.

Warm regards,

Urs

Things that get attention… and a new virtual storage array ...

Urs Renggli — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:03:00 GMT

Hello again,

Today I’d like to talk about some things that are getting a lot of attention – blades, virtualisation and storage. These are all major investment areas for midsize businesses, so naturally all the vendors are looking at ways to attract customers who may be considering these technologies.

These topics are certainly getting a lot of media attention too, so your trade magazines have also seen the need. On the subject of blades it was my pleasure to take part in an interview with Mike Vizzard, editorial director at publisher Ziff Davis, which was posted on E-Week.com: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Storage/How-to-Upgrade-Data-Center-Infrastructure

Our customer Matt Staver, IT director of Pentel, the midsize business that makes the famous pens, also participated and talks about some of the challenges he faced as well as benefits he got from moving to a bladed infrastructure, like cost savings from maintenance. If you’re looking at blades this is essential listening.

Another SMB reporter, Drew Robb of ServerWatch.com wrote a thought-provoking article about virtualization and storage, which I know are top of mind for many of you: http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3726741

He notes that virtualization management is quite complex and believes that additional IT specialist will be needed to get it up and running. However, HP has produced products such as Virtual Connect and Virtualization Management Software specifically to simplify management and control so additional IT specialists are not needed.

We did this because we recognize that midsize business have limited staff and budgets but still need to get the benefits of these key technologies.

Some of the benefits of virtualisation are well documented in the article, including cost savings, flexibility and speed of deployment, but it isn’t necessarily the right move for everyone.

So if you are wondering whether virtualisation is the right step for you, you could consider our Virtualization Assessment Service, http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/vmware/iap-description.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

which will give you a much greater degree of confidence on how to spend your limited budget.

New HP virtual storage array announced today!

And last, but certainly not least here’s something that combines two of our favourite subjects – virtualisation and storage. Today we announced the new HP StorageWorks EVA 4400, is an easy-to-manage virtual storage disk array designed specifically for midsize customers who need to reduce the costs and complexity of implementing a storage-area network (SAN).

We think you will really like it because it offers enterprise-class high-performance and availability features, virtualisation capabilities and advanced provisioning software, but in a cost-effectively system that lets you manage large amounts of data in a SAN environment without investing in deep storage experience.

To find out more about the EVA 4400, click here - http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/eva4400/index.html

Let us know if you have questions about any of these key business technologies, or would like to share your experiences.

All the best,

Urs

MANAGING YOUR DATA EXPLOSION

Urs Renggli — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:23:00 GMT

Hello again,

One of the consistent things I hear from midsize business customers is that they struggle to cope with the burgeoning amount of data in their organisations. Many have direct-attached storage which makes the sharing of storage resources difficult, thus increasing the problem.

Any data storage expert will tell you that implementing a storage area network (SAN) is one of the most effective ways to build in the flexibility, high availability and scalability needed in a modern business technology infrastructure.

One of the arguments I hear against SANs is that some midsize customers think of them as being difficult to implement and manage, and that they can’t afford SAN specialists in the IT function. HP, takes it very serious to design products specifically for midsized customer needs that are simple, affordable and reliable.

That’s why today HP announced the new HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array family (MSA2000), a new generation of entry-level, low-cost Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI disk arrays.

These have been designed to offer a highly available, virtualized SAN environment to effectively help manage exponential data growth especially for customers with smaller site. At an affordable cost, growing businesses can with the new products launched today increase disk utilization and performance with simplified back-up and recovery capabilities.

Standardized storage management software maximizes administrator efficiency and streamlines IT processes. We’ve also built in features you’d only normally expect to find on higher priced systems, including Snap and Clone to protect their data and ensure business continuity.

If you still have most of your storage attached directly to your servers or if you are concerned with regards to data availability make sure to check out the news of today. I am sure it could make a big difference for you and your company as data availability is a critical element for running your business.

Click below to learn more and let us know what you think about this cool product.

Press Release

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080206xb.html

WW Announcement page:

www.hp.com/go/msa2000

We know you are a highly creative bunch, extracting the most from your limited resources, and we’d like to know what you are doing to manage exploding data growth. Post here to tell us and your peers how you do it.

Regards,

Urs

Taking "Total Care" of Midsized Customers

Urs Renggli — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:55:00 GMT

I just returned from a 2 day SMB planning meeting in the bay area with colleagues from all across HP discussing how to even better serve small and midsized customers in the future. During the meeting we spent a good amount of time on a great SMB initiative that we have in place across all business groups benefiting both small and midsized customers called HP Total Care.

HP Total Care provides services, tools and options for the full lifecycle of your IT infrastructure and is tailored completely for small and midsize business customers. Whether you're investigating a purchase, implementing new equipment, safeguarding your data or retiring outdated machines, HP Total Care has great services and tools to help you. A common complain I hear often from midsized customers is that they don’t have the time to search our website to find tools and information that are relevant for them rather than large Enterprise Customers. Total Care does this very well in that it only includes services and tools that truly are relevant for customers with smaller sites.

With HP Total Care, your business benefits from HP's and our many channel partners expertise, enabling more measured expenditures up front and helping to recoup end-of-life assets. You can enjoy personalized services that can increase your return on investment, lower your total cost of ownership, and streamline and improve your computing infrastructure and end user experiences.

I am sure you care about your IT Infrastructure across its entire lifecycle so does Total Care – from choosing it, configuring it, protecting it, tuning it, and all the way to recycling it and with that helping you to make more efficient use of limited IT resources and staffing.

Choose—Availability to technology resources when you need them helping you to choose what is right for you
Use—HP offers a variety of resource options to ensure you get the most of your technology
Protect—Your business is seamlessly connected to the tools that keep your business data safe
Transition—Recycle old technology and take advantage of HP’s energy-efficient and environmentally friendly solutions

I would like to encourage you to read more about Total Care on our website and with that start to leverage this great initiative also for your midsized company.

Total Care Website: http://www.hp.com/sbso/serverstorage/total-care1.html

Next to the detailed information using the link above, I would like to invite you to sit back, relax and watch a couple of fun clips we have made to explain a few of the many elements of HP Total Care:

Life without HP: "Expert" Support - There's no substitute for HP Support:

http://hpcorp.feedroom.com/?fr_chl=b4ff0e362ab6fe523b1c6430593aec82f52afe72&rf=bm

Life without HP: Creative Financing - Total Care makes financing easy:

http://hpcorp.feedroom.com/?fr_chl=b4ff0e362ab6fe523b1c6430593aec82f52afe72&rf=bm

Life without HP: Damage Protection - Total Care lets you work worry-free:

http://hpcorp.feedroom.com/?fr_chl=b4ff0e362ab6fe523b1c6430593aec82f52afe72&rf=bm

Over the coming weeks, I will highlight what I think are some of the greatest tools and services for midsized customers that we provide with HP Total Care. Let me know if you have any specific areas of interest after looking through some of the information using the links above.