While the average corporate branch office doesn’t require a lot of infrastructure to support its operations, the limited amount of equipment that does have to be deployed on the premises is expected to provide many of the same capabilities as a full-blown data center. Hewlett Packard Enterprise added a new model to its hyperconverged appliance family this morning that promises to make it much easier for organizations to meet the requirement.

The HC 380 combines the vendor’s popular ProLiant DL380 server with direct-attached storage drives and a graphical control panel that reduces most administrative chores to a series of mouse commands. Firmware updates and new drivers can be installed in three clicks,  according to HPE, while setting up a virtual machine requires as little as five. And it only takes another 15 minutes or so to allocate capacity for the instance using HPE’s thanks to automated provisioning capabilities.

The functionality comes as part of the StoreVirtual VSA storage management software included in the HC 380, which also helps administrators protect the data kept on their deployments against the possibility of hardware malfunctions. HPE says that the software makes it possible to keep information accessible 99.999 percent of the time, meaning there’s only about five minutes worth of outages per year. Operational reliability can increase even further in a large deployment with multiple ProLiant DL380s capable of easily picking up the slack if one or several of their peers go offline.

The HC 380 can scale to as many as 16 nodes, which is enough to support the vast majority of branch office environments. HPE hopes that the appliance will also appeal to midsize businesses that likewise have limited infrastructure requirements and would rather not buy each hardware component separately. But while having servers and storage come in the same pre-configured bundle is certainly an attractive proposition, the vendor is not the only one in the hyperconverged game, which is why it’s also offering a number of value-added services on the side to try and stand out.

HC 380 customers can choose to be billed based on how much of the infrastructure in their deployments is being actively used, and rent off-premise resources from Microsoft Corp.’s public cloud via HPE to avoid the hassle of dealing with multiple vendors. The appliance is set to hit general availability later this month.

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