Hewlett-Packard is kicking off its annual Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas with the usual bevy of product announcements, this time placing the emphasis on the solidly growing, entry-level storage market. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often rely on local resellers to recommend, deploy and manage hardware—which means plenty of business for HP’s partners.

The channel has always been a top priority for HP, which saw its storage revenue increase 25.3 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, CRN reports. The firm’s continued success in this market can be credited, in part, to the opinion that it’s a “great company to work with,” according to Patrick Stewart, Vice President and General Manager at IT distributor Avnet Technology Solutions. Stewart discussed Avnet’s collaboration with HP from a channel partner’s perspective with theCube cohosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick, live at the HP Discover conference last year.

“As one of the largest technology companies in the world, HP has learned early on that the channel is the right way to go to market,” Stewart said in the interview at HP Discover. “Under Meg [Whitman] now, you’re seeing a re-commitment to that and even a stronger emphasis because, as HP looks at how they’re going to grow and drive new products to market, the channel is the only way for them to be successful.”

Vish Mulchand, Senior Director of Project Management and Marketing for HP Storage, agrees that HP’s channel community plays a major role in its success, particularly when addressing the small and midsized customer. “Our channel drives about 85 to 90 percent of this business,” Mulchand told siliconANGLE in an interview. “So it’s critical that we give them the tools and resources to help them quickly find the right solution to meet customer’s need.”

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Introducing the HP MSA 1040

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The HP MSA 1040, one of the solutions unveiled at today’s event, is a dual-controller storage area network (SAN) array that offers 50 percent higher performance than its predecessor, the company said. It supports 1GbE iSCSI, 10 GbE iSCSI and 8Gb Fibre Channel connectivity, accommodates a larger number of virtual machines, and allows for data-in-place upgrades from the MSA P2000 G3 and to the more feature-rich MSA 2040. That can save admins the trouble of migrating information to the new system, reducing the risk of human error and freeing up time better spent elsewhere.

“The new MSA 1040 delivers 20 to 50 percent more performance than the previous generation MSA (P2000 G3) at 25 percent less cost,” Mulchand elaborated. “The MSA 2040 platform delivers two to four times the performance than the P2000 G3 at a still affordable entry price point (starting at $11,070). This is allowing HP to offer a solid value proposition to our P200 customers (who are focused on the lowest entry price point due to tight budgets) and to offer substantially better performance to our performance-minded customers focused on IOPS.”

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Latest-generation HP StoreEasy SAN appliance

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The MSA 1040 made its debut in conjunction with the latest generation HP StoreEasy network-attached storage (SAN) appliance, which will become generally available on April 7, 2014. The newest HP StoreEasy appliance packs a unified monitoring console, an automated setup tool that promises to accelerate deployment, and new performance capabilities for Hyper-V. “The latest generation HP StoreEasy Storage features the state-of-the-art SMB 3.02 protocol,” Mulchand said. “This new version of the SMB protocol includes a range of improvements that Microsoft Hyper-V benefits from, including in the areas of bandwidth and quality of service management.

“It is now possible to configure bandwidth limits for the three defined traffic types of default, live migration, and virtual machine. Additionally, clients can be automatically rebalanced between nodes in a clustered configuration to improve efficiency, and a SMB instance can run on each node specifically to handle Clustered Shared Volume inter-node traffic.”

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HP StoreOnce 4500 backup platform updated

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HP Storage’s Vish Mulchand

Lastly, HP upped the maximum capacity of its HP StoreOnce 4500 backup platform to 124 terabytes and updated the configuration to support any mix of 2TB and 4TB drives. A 48 terabyte expansion shelf is set to launch next Monday (March 31), alongside the MSA 1040 and a free firmware and software update for existing users. “The update for the StoreOnce 4500 enables customers to scale from 24TB to 160TB,” Mulchand said. “For a customer that is enabling backup for Big Data workloads, HP offers StoreOnce scale-out solutions that scale up to 1.7PB. For a typical deduplication ratio of 20:1, this would enable a customer to store 34PB of logical backups on a StoreOnce 6500. This is an extremely scalable solution for Big Data backup.”

The new and updated systems will all be made available under the Simply StoreIT track in the company’s Just Right IT umbrella program for SMB partners, together with support services, training material and other useful resources. HP Simply StoreIT is available to all HP resellers globally, and [offers] tools and resources found easily on the HP Partner Portal. “Simply StoreIT was designed to help partners market, sell, design and deploy storage solutions for small and midsized customers,” Mulchand explained. “And we’ve had solid adoption of this across 35 countries and enablement of about 7000+ [individual partners] worldwide.”

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Watch the entire HP Discover 2013 theCUBE interview with Patrick Stewart, Vice President and General Manager at Avnet Technology Solutions:

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photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

Photo and video of Patrick Stewart courtesy of theCUBE

Photo of Vish Mulchand courtesy of HP

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this article.