Thanks to the growing competition in the storage market, small and midsized companies have more arrays to choose from than ever. The latest vendor to turn its attention towards this segment is Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is launching two entry-level systems that provide many of the same features included in its more expensive gear.

The first addition is the StoreVirtual 3200, a hybrid array that features snapshotting functionality, a built-in replication mechanism and support for thin provisioning. It’s also able to provide 99.999 percent availability thanks to a resilient architecture that it shares with HPE’s high-end systems.

According to Computerworld, the vendor managed to make the appliance available from as little as $6,000 by including a low-cost ARM processor under the hood instead of the Intel Corp. silicon that usually powers storage equipment. This sum only buys 1.2 terabytes of capacity, but the system can be scaled to 14 terabytes if needed for less half the cost of a comparable StoreVirtual 4000 model. Customers also have a choice of equipping the system with a little flash to speed up their most important workloads.

The StorageVirtual 3200 is joined by a hybrid SAN array called the MSA 2042 that provides the same management features plus 800 gigabytes of speedy flash. HPE claims that the system improves application response times by up to 80 percent compared to the older MSA 2040 model while giving customers choice in exactly how they harness its SSDs. The memory can serve as a cache and hold the most frequently-accessed information in a deployment, or be used to support high-priority workloads like databases.

Both the StorageVirtual 3200 and the MSA 2042, which starts at $9,877, are available immediately. The launch comes less than a week after Nimble Storage Inc. introduced an entry-level system of its own that can provide up to 165 terabytes usable flash capacity in a 4U form factor.

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