HP will begin shipping a new version of its storage resource management software in June that allows midsize businesses to gain control over their rapidly expanding storage environments.

HP Storage Essentials Standard Edition Storage Resource Management (SRM) Software automates complex and manual tasks, and improves the utilization of IT resources via a single, secure, web-based interface.

Introduced at Storage Networking World, the software is the first product rollout from HP's recently formed Enterprise Storage and Server Software business unit, which provides software to manage, virtualize and automate customers' IT systems.

"HP has created an entry-level storage software solution with enterprise-class, peak performance standards without sacrificing quality or features," said Nick van der Zweep, director of product marketing for the Enterprise Storage and Software Division at HP. "The latest Storage Essentials offering is yet another illustration of HP's growing portfolio of tailored solutions designed specifically to meet the needs of midsize business customers."

HP Storage Essentials is built on the latest open standards, including SMI-S and J2EE, and integrates with HP Systems Insight Manager software for unified server and storage management.

HP Storage Essentials Standard Edition reduces complexity in small to medium HP storage-based storage area networks (SANs) by offering customers a complete view of their storage systems. Using HP Storage Essentials provides customers with greater optimization of SAN and network-attached storage (NAS) capacity, increased IT staff efficiency and simplified end-to-end management processes.

he single web-based interface efficiently centralizes and automates a complete storage infrastructure, from Windows and Linux servers to HP StorageWorks EVA and HP MSA disk array families, HP ProLiant Storage Servers, HP EML E-Series tape libraries, host-bus adapters, and fabric switches. This allows a single IT administrator to easily manage tasks at the application level down to the spindle, including end-to-end troubleshooting, reporting, file level scanning, integrated SAN and NAS management, and monitoring of infrastructure performance and utilization rates. An optional software plug-in is also available for customers to monitor the status of an entire backup process.

HP Storage Essentials Standard Edition is expected to be upgradeable later this year to HP Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition Software Suite to provide customers with effortless scalability to a larger, heterogeneous, multi-vendor SAN environment.

For more information, see www.hp.com/ go/ sese. ENS