The fact that hyperconverged appliances can be managed centrally makes them immensely appealing to small and midsize businesses with limited IT staff. However, SMEs often struggle to take advantage of the benefits since most systems are geared towards the enterprise crowd and carry a price tag to match. To try and remedy the situation, Nutanix Inc. today added a new entry-level model to its popular hyperconverged lineup that will become available next month for as little as $25,000.

Dubbed Xpress, the system includes all the key features of the startup’s bigger appliances, most notably its Acropolis hypervisor. The KVM derivative comes ready to use out of the box and enables administrators to start provisioning virtual machines within less than an hour of setting up the box in their environments, according to Nutanix. As a result, it removes the need to buy expensive third party virtualization software, which can free up a significant portion of the average small or midsize firm’s technology budget.

Xpress does, however, provide integration with external management automation tools to accommodate firms that still prefer to go with an external hypervisor vendor like VMware Inc. or Microsoft Corporation. And to top it off, the appliance can also connect to popular public clouds for backup purposes. Nutanix says that the entire process of installing the system, plugging it into a company’s existing infrastructure and start deploying applications takes just a single administrator, which frees up the rest of the IT department to spend their resources elsewhere.

That should be appealing not only to SMEs, but also large enterprises that want to keep hardware at branch locations without having to station a team of technicians on each site. Every Express system will be able to support up to 500 virtual machines and comes with a three-year maintenance contract that provides full access to Nutanix’s support resources.

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