ANTenna Blog -- Hardware & Software

Business innovation may come from out-of-the-box thinking, but for ease and simplicity there's undeniable appeal to keeping things in the box. That's the concept behind HP's Adaptive Infrastructure in a Box -- everything's in the box, open it up and you're up and running faster than you can say Happy Meal.

Like most recent midmarket announcements from HP, the box infrastructure rollout flogs the triumvirate of simplicity, affordability, and reliability. As buzzwords go, these are audience appropriate and Urs Renggli, director of worldwide small and midmarket business for the HP Technology Solutions Group, brought them home in pumping the value prop of the product. "The key reason for the developing the box is that there are lots of customers out there with 5-7 year old tower server infrastructures," said Renggli. "They need to update, but they have a fear of moving to something new. The box shows them the way to update and allows midsize businesses t replace their infrastructure in a very seamless way."

HP's new Adaptive Infrastructure in a Box is a suite of products and services that includes servers, storage, management, automation, power and cooling, virtualization, and security. It utilizes the HP BladeSystem portfolio and Windows Server 2008.

Joe Leung, worldwide program manager for HP ProLiant Business Advantage built on Renggli's message of simplicity. "It's about overcoming barriers," he said. "Its quick, easy, and affordable to apply a new infrastructure, whether that's upgrading, refreshing, replacing, or adding capacity and you don't need a specialist to the get same robust infrastructure that the big boys already use."

Other than the pejorative comparative implications of big boys v. the mid market, Leung lays out a value prop that should appeal to any midmarket company with trepidation about investing in infrastructure updates or (and more important and costly) the IT expertise to make it fly.

The concern with any all-encompassing, pre-packaged solution is the limitations and lack of customization. HP is counting on the VAR network to close that gap. Said Renggli, "VARs can build on top of this and customize so you don't pay for what you don't need. And most implementions are measured in hours and days rather than weeks."

And speaking of costs, HP provides sample use cases for three different reference architectures to provide an indicative pricing guideline:

• 300 users: $18,000


• 500 users: $30,000


• 1000 users: $39,000

The leap from 300 to 500 is due to the different Blade model as well as additional storage and and redundancy.

As far as the ROI out of the box, Renggli and Leung were quick to note an IDC benchmark based upon a 100 user case that yielded 500% ROI over a 3-year period -- the largest contributor to that overwhelming metric being a 42% increase in IT productivity.

Now, that's some box.