Hewlett-Packard is to introduce several new storage, virtualization, PC, printing and services offerings in an effort to capture a larger share of the Small and Midsize Business (SMB) market.

The move comes as the company begins consultations on cutting nearly six thousand European jobs, including 850 in the UK and Germany.

Many of these are at its plant in Erskine, Renfrewshire, because production of servers and storage devices is moving to the Czech Republic.

HP had warned that more job cuts were coming when it announced second quarter results recently. The company made profits of USD $1.72bn on sales of USD $27.4bn in the three months ended April.

The new offerings announced this week are part of the Hewlett-Packard Total Care initiative for SMBs, aimed at providing a full range of products, services, tools, training, financing and recycling.

On the storage side, HP unveiled a new SMB line of appliances and expanded its existing MSA family.

This includes the StorageWorks X1000 family of appliances, which brings together both file storage and application-based storage.

The X1000 line replaces HP’s entry-level All-in-One storage appliances. It is based on the vendor’s latest-generation ProLiant G6 server platform, and includes Microsoft’s new Windows Storage Server 2008 Standard x64 Edition operating system.

Another newcomer is the StorageWorks X3000, a gateway appliance that connects to other storage capacity on the back end to add iSCSI and file services capabilities to existing storage arrays.

HP also unveiled two new models in its MSA 2000 family of storage arrays. The StorageWorks 2000i includes an iSCSI interface, and the StorageWorks 2000sa includes a SAS interface.

HP also is helping smaller businesses with new virtualization bundles that include both server and storage technology.

The bundles include a combination of ProLiant servers, LeftHand software for building virtual storage appliances, VMware software for building virtual servers, ProCurve switches and HP’s Insight management software.

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