A year after debuting its first entry into the world of hyperconverged appliances, Hewlett-Packard Co. is launching a successor described as faster, more efficient and, perhaps most importantly, fairly easy to use. That reflects a focus on small- and medium-sized buyers with limited resources that are interested in keeping their management overhead to a minimum.

With that in mind, the new ConvergedSystem 250-HC StoreVirtual provides a straightforward installation wizard that the company says allows customers to get up and running in about 15 minutes, with about two-thirds of that time spent waiting for everything to load.  From there, virtual machines can be launched almost immediately thanks to pre-configured support for VMware, Inc.’s popular virtualization software.

The appliance also ships with HP’s own OneView management stack, which provides unified control over the servers, storage and networking equipment inside the chassis. The specific combination varies based on the model, with the most expensive four-node configuration offering up to 96 processing cores – a 20 percent increase over its predecessor – and a maximum of two terabytes of memory.

The cheaper three-node configuration, meanwhile, is touted as 49 percent more cost-effective than a comparable system from rival Nutanix, Inc., one of the top-selling hyperconvereged appliance makers with a run rate of over $300 million as of the fourth quarter of 2014. Like its beefier sibling, the model provides a choice of flash, traditional disk drives or a combination thereof.

To help customers make the most of that capacity, the ConvergedSystem 250-HC also comes with three complementary licenses of HP’s StoreVirtual VSA platform, which can be deployed on third party infrastructure to create backup targets capable of holding four terabytes worth of copies each. That means companies are able to make use of their existing hardware for data protection instead of having to buy dedicated appliances that incur additional expenses and management overhead.

Rounding out the value proposition is an optional installation of HP’s CloudSystem stack, which makes it possible to extend the local capacity of the appliance with resources from its Helion infrastructure-as-a-service platform. It’s available for both the four-node ConvergedSystem 250-HC, which will become available for purchase in two weeks, and the three-node model set to follow suit at the end of September.

Photo via HP