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How do you select the right servers, storage and solutions that are sized and suited for your unique medium business needs?
Start with these three considerations to help you decide whether an offering measures up:
1. Security: Can it protect your IT resources & data?
Security breaches can cause two serious problems: They can prevent you from accessing the data core to running your business, and they may cause you to lose that data irrevocably. Prevention is key, but you probably have few – if any – security experts on staff that can design and implement security solutions and manage them daily.
Shop for multilayered security solutions that:
- Identify and protect against a range of threats, including viruses, spyware, spam and intrusion
- Protect from both internal and external attack and misuse
- Are easy to use and maintain (without hiring full-time security experts)
2. Efficiency: Will it simplify management & reduce complexity?
Your business might not have thousands of servers, but that doesn’t mean complexity isn’t a problem. In fact, it can be a bigger challenge for midsize businesses because IT staff members tend to be generalists without the highly specialised experience and skills required to integrate disparate technologies and applications.
Standards-based solutions can increase business efficiency by:
- Simplifying server and storage management
- Automatically allocating resources to help maximise their use
- Assisting in lowering costs
- Easing collaboration with partners, employees and customers
- Opening up your business to a broad ecosystem of partners that provide the software you need to operate more effectively in your industry
3. Continuity: Will it help you build & maintain a highly-available IT infrastructure?
Business interruptions can be fatal to midsize companies. But they don’t have to happen, as long as you’ve built an infrastructure that’s protected and redundant enough to avoid problems, and resilient enough to recover if they do happen.
Look for these key features:
- Modularity – lets you easily expand your network, storage or solutions as demand escalates
- Redundancy – offers fail-over capabilities when a component malfunctions
- Replication – facilitates data replication and restoration
- Automation – can sense problem states and take corrective action before disaster strikes, freeing IT staff from repetitive, manually intensive tasks, i.e. “babysitting the infrastructure”
Designed for midsize businesses: Simple, affordable, reliable
While there’s plenty of lip service to meeting midsize companies’ information technology needs, the reality is more sobering. Look for solutions designed to fill the special needs of midsize companies, not merely glorified small business products or compromised enterprise solutions.
HP’s solutions are built on three major design principles drawn from midsize businesses themselves: simplicity, affordability and reliability.
HP offers practical solutions that deliver immediate value by being simple to install, use and manage. The HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System for example, can be dropped into an existing network to create a storage area network in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours or days normally required. The Storage All-in-One hides the complexity of configuring and managing the SAN from administrators – no expert knowledge required.
Another example is the HP ProLiant Essentials Server Migration Pack (Physical to ProLiant Edition). This tool lets you move the contents of any existing server to an HP ProLiant in a matter of hours using a simple eight-step wizard. Manually migrating the operating system, applications and data, by contrast, can take days. Upgrade your ageing servers to the newest HP ProLiant server technology with confidence, ease and without breaking the bank.
HP solutions are proven reliable and trusted by midsize companies around the world. According to AMI Partners, HP is the leading provider of servers and storage to midsize businesses like yours. There’s a reason for that: HP has a strong reputation for working with thousands of midsize companies to help them address security, efficiency and continuity – the three most pressing challenges they face today. |
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