Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

SNW: First Take: Page 5 of 12

Today, for example, the vendor will launch its Standard Edition Storage Resource Manager (SRM) software, a stripped-down version of the Enterprise SRM offering that was launched back in 2005. "We feel that there's quite a lot of untapped opportunity in the SMB market," says John Kelly, marketing manager for HP's Storage Essentials products, adding that the vendor's EVA, in particular, is gaining traction.

Unlike the heterogeneous Enterprise offering, which was originally developed by AppIQ, the standard edition can only manage HP storage. The scaled down version also lacks the provisioning capabilities of its predecessor, although it can be used for managing NAS and file systems.

Pricing for the Standard Edition, which will be available in June, will start at around $37,000, depending on the number of Fibre Channel ports and applications to be managed, compared to around $50,000 for the Enterprise Edition.

The Standard Edition of SRM is also the first product to emerge from HP's newly-created Enterprise Storage and Server (ESS) Software business unit. (See HP Reshuffles More Software and HP Creates New Biz Unit.)

Startup Siafu Software is also looking to tap into SMB spending with the launch of an iSCSI SAN/NAS device at SNW. Thankfully avoiding the alphanumeric nomenclature that blights the storage industry, the Swarm 100 appliance offers between 1 and 3 Tbytes of raw capacity.