Prime Time For SANs

In a recent CRN Solution Provider poll, about a quarter of all solution providers said they were currently selling SAN solutions, a respectable number considering that for the past 10 years SANs have largely been confined to complex solutions for large enterprises.

But now many solution providers see the technology sitting squarely in the "early majority" adoption phase, with a mass market opening up for a proven technology. In the January poll, an additional 17 percent of solution providers said they were considering or planning to jump into SAN solutions, a sure sign that this elevator is on the ground floor and ready to rise.

Another sign is that within the past year nearly all the major storage networking vendors started shipping products and bundles aimed at bringing SANs to small businesses. For solution providers weighing the opportunity, the time may be now to climb on board. But there are a few things to know about the technology and the market before jumping in.

While cutting-edge enterprises are enhancing their mature SANs with storage virtualization, small businesses are still early adopters. If they have heard of SANs at all, they don't understand the benefits or they worry that a SAN is too expensive to even consider, solution providers in the market say.

That means sales cycles can be long, averaging from one to four months. But a typical project also runs about $10,000—and much higher for some—with 75 percent or more of those dollars coming from deployment services, the CRN poll indicated. That spells profits. Averages, though, mean little in a market where deal sizes are all over the map.

The primary barrier to selling a SAN to a small business is cost, solution providers said. A basic SAN, including the storage capacity and the deployment, can cost anywhere from $5,000 on up. James Rupprecht, sales engineer at Valcom Networks, a Salt Lake City-based solution provider, said it is important to show small businesses how the advantages of a SAN far outweigh their costs.

"You have to convince the boss that their data will be safer on a SAN than on a couple of beefy direct-attached hard drives," Rupprecht said. "And it's more scalable, so they don't need to buy new equipment when their data grows. And they get snapshots and replication."

A SAN can be affordable if solution providers work with a variety of solutions to meet small storage budgets, said Eryck Bredy, president of Bredy Network Management, a Woburn, Mass.-based solution provider.

One option is a custom solution. Instead of buying a name-brand iSCSI storage array, Bredy helps many of his customers install DataCore Software's SANmelody software on an off-the-shelf PC-based server and turn it into an iSCSI array. "The software starts at $1,178," Bredy said. "It can be set up for IP SAN or Fibre Channel. There's no need to go out and buy an EMC box. Then the customer says, 'Oh, I thought it would cost tens of thousands of dollars.' "

Explaining the benefits can be tougher. From a technical perspective, SAN, NAS and internal storage all share the same model of providing access to a company's data, but each technology handles that data access in a very different fashion.

As the name implies, storage area networks are all about networking storage. SANs are built from unique hardware components—RAID storage arrays, switches, hubs, bridges, servers and cabling—that come together to create a high-speed storage system. The variety of components involved makes SANs very customizable and infinitely scalable.

That flexibility allows VARs to design the perfect SAN solution for their customers and not sacrifice future scalability or limit upgrades. Unlike NAS, SANs provide low-level access to data blocks, which is very similar to the method used for internal ATA/SCSI disk drives and is often referred to as block storage. That translates to impressive speeds— speeds that can exceed several Gbits per second.

NEXT: SAN connectivity.