Small Wonders

When it comes to storage, there's no shortage of products, and they run the gamut, from jump drives in grocery stores to large-scale, pricey enterprise arrays. But there's also a growing segment of products that are a notch or two above consumer-grade yet feature-rich enough to help solve one of the biggest threats to small business: data loss.

According to AMI-Partners, almost three out of five of all small businesses and one in six midsize organizations fail to back up their systems routinely. Even those that do are not fully protected, leaving them vulnerable to data loss if notebooks are stolen or viruses cripple a system.

A growing number of disk-based tools are addressing even the smallest of businesses, making backup an easy sell to even the most uninitiated of customers. Perhaps further validating this is that one of the largest storage vendors--EMC--has embraced the small-business market in a big way. That's significant, considering the company once shunned that segment.

"This is the beginning of a major push into the SMB for EMC," says Larry Zulch, vice president and general manager of the new EMC Insignia brand. Zulch was the former CEO of Dantz, which EMC acquired about 18 months ago. Dantz provided backup software that was popular in the SMB space.

The EMC Insignia product line will consist of solutions based on the Dantz product line, as well as other components suitable for small businesses from other parts of EMC, including Legato, Documentum (which acquired eRoom before it was acquired by EMC) and some hardware.

For Kevin Klein, president of Three18, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based solution provider that targets SMB customers, taking on the EMC Insignia line was a natural evolution.

A longtime Dantz partner, Klein is going to bundle turnkey solutions based on Dantz Retrospect and the EMX AX100 array. In the past, he offered hardware from Hillsboro, Ore.-based La Cie and MicroNet, Torrance, Calif. While he had no complaints about either vendor's offerings, he likes the idea of providing a single-source solution.

"When a company can deliver a soup-to-nuts solution, that generally provides a competitive advantage," Klein says. To be sure, EMC executives say the company's Insignia initiative is not about throwing a bunch of products together and saying they are targeted at small businesses, Zulch says. The company has rolled out three EMC Insignia products specifically focused at SMBs.

Among the solutions in EMC's Insignia line is Retrospect Backup Solution 7.5, which lets users initiate their own restores when data is lost, automates deployment of Windows clients via Microsoft's SMS, Active Directory Group Policy or other deployment tools, and supports Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005, and Linux and Macintosh clients. Other tools include Clariion AX Series disk arrays, which support iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity; Storage Administrator for Exchange SMB Edition; RepliStor SMB Edition for replication; Visual SRM SMB Edition; and eRoom SMB Edition.

NEXT: While EMC is going downmarket, another company associated with low-end wares--Iomega--is moving up the food chain.

In the two years since Iomega launched its REV drive technology, the 35-GB disks have become a viable option over optical drives for backing up servers in small offices. Having delivered 1 million disks, the company is now preparing a portable external device that will let customers load up to eight cartridges in a single box.

Iomega will start shipping the REV Loader 280 next month. The box, measuring 5 inches by 7 inches, connects to any server or PC via USB and comes with software that automates backups. With eight disks at 35 GB each, that amounts to 280 GB per loader natively and 560 GB compressed.

The company is hoping to expand its REV technology into the lucrative area of automated backup-and-recovery solutions for workgroups and small businesses. At the desktop level, REV drives have typically been offered in single-disk configurations, requiring one drive per disk.

"We're taking REV to the next level," says Bob Lutz, Iomega's REV product line manager. "This is the world's first [hard-disk-based] desktop [form factor] backup solution." Iomega is positioning the new loader as an alternative to tape-based backup and large, external, desktop disk drives.

Lutz says the case for replacing tape drives with this type of offering is pretty convincing: Recoveries are much faster, thanks to the random-access nature of disk vs. tape.

"The beauty of REV drives is that they're so fast and you have the additional capacity," says Rick Tashman, sales manager at Syscom Technologies, a Marietta, Ga.-based solution provider and Iomega partner. Also, at a price of about $1,000, the cost is compelling, he adds.

But what about other desktop options, such as RAID-based, 1-TB drives--for example, the recently introduced Maxtor OneTouch III and the Yellow Machine from Anthology Solutions?

"Most business don't want to have a single-point backup," Lutz says, noting that with the autoloader, a customer can segment the drives to cover various points in time. Lutz says the REV disks are based on 4,200-rpm, 2.5-inch notebook drives.

Later this year, Iomega plans to double the storage capacity of its REV drives and disks, bringing the capacity to 70 GB per cartridge. The older disks will run in the new units, but not vice versa, Iomega's Lutz says.

Will this concept take hold and lead to many millions of REV disks deployed? Syscom's Tashman says REV is still a well-kept secret. "It hasn't reached its potential," he adds.

For those who prefer a box with built-in drives, there's no shortage of new offerings in the channel these days. In the past few months alone, Anthology, La Cie, Maxtor and MicroNet have released new standalone drives. Anthology is the newest entree to the pack, but it has been recruiting channel partners aggressively for its distinguished-looking Yellow Machine. Since the product's launch last year, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Anthology has already signed on more than 200 channel partners.

But the Yellow Machine has more going for it than just a pretty package. The desktop device can support up to 2 terabytes of RAID storage with an embedded VPN, firewall and network switch for remote access, as well as LDAP directories and Microsoft's Active Directory for network environments.

Tim Kelley, director of sales and marketing at C&C Medical, a health-care solution provider, has already deployed numerous Yellow Machines in some university hospitals, which use them to store electronic X-rays. As more and more medical data is digitized, the need for these devices will grow, Kelley says. "Digital is very young in the medical world, but these devices will trickle down to clinics and, ultimately, every doctor's office will need something like this," he says.

Among other options are Maxtor's OneTouch III. And LaCie's Two Big drives, due out next quarter, are available in 500-MB and 1-TB configurations, have a RAID selection switch, and support hot-swappable SATA II drives and a 4-port SATA II PCI-X card.

For more elaborate applications, MicroNet last month released PlatinumNAS, available in configurations of up to 2 TB and with support for RAID 1, 5 and 10. Distributed by Ingram Micro, the 2-TB drive sells for about $3,000.