Hewlett-Packard can't afford to have small and medium businesses become deer in the headlights of the economic meltdown. And so, the company is starting to kick out deals and services to make it easier for SMBs to acquire its servers and storage despite the uncertain business climate.

Today, HP rolled out a babysitting service for most of its ProLiant rack and tower servers (the entire line excepting the low-end ProLiant 100 series, which are really aimed at supercomputing and hyperscale data center customers that just want CPU engines on the cheap), its BladeSystem blade chassis and related ProLiant blade servers (including blade storage modules), and its StorageWorks EVA midrange disk arrays.

With the babysitting service - Insight Remote Support, which has been in beta testing inside HP for the past several months - the company is trying to address some pain points that SMB shops have when it comes to dealing with servers and storage and do so in a way that doesn't hit the IT budget. According to Duncan Campbell, vice president of adaptive infrastructure and small and midmarket business at HP, the company polled its own SMB customer base and found out that 90 per cent of them are worried about unplanned downtime for their systems and 83 per cent are struggling with managing their infrastructure.