State of Technology: Disk Drives Hold the Throne

As if 9/11 and the summer-of-2003 blackout weren't calamitous enough, they also underscored corporate America's dire need for better storage technology and enhanced backup-and-recovery policies.

Add to that the advent of multiorganization portals and Web services, more creative hackers, and a flurry of legislation around keeping corporate entities honest, and protecting customer data has become an even more daunting charge for VARs.

And so it is that despite the availability of network-attached storage (NAS) and SANs, the priority for most VARs remains the same: backup and recovery. More than 72 percent of respondents to the VARBusiness State of Technology survey said they plan to sell or recommend backup-and-recovery solutions in the next 12 months. About 51 percent plan to sell SANs, roughly 60 percent plan to sell NAS, and 63 percent will sell RAID and DAS.

Storage has become almost as important as security to solution providers that build Web services and related technologies.

"We've had numerous portals in the works for quite a while and have built out the infrastructure to support them," says Mo Bakheit, practices manager for mobility assurance at GTSI, a government-focused reseller in Chantilly, Va. "To get high-availability accelerated Web services with the appropriate security requires mass storage."

Symantec put its money on the convergence of storage and security with its highly scrutinized purchase of Veritas in late 2004. But more than a year later, most observers--VARs included--remain unclear on how the companies' technologies will fit together.

"There might be a convergence play with regulatory compliance issues, because [some] laws require storing e-mails for a certain period of time," says Steve Groom, director of security and wireless technologies at TIG, a service provider in San Diego.

In the meantime, SANs and NAS are accounting for a relatively small piece of the revenue pie for solution providers. According to our survey, SANs are expected to generate roughly 10 percent of respondents' revenue in 2006, and NAS is expected to generate about 8 percent.

Maybe that's because Microsoft is the only player pushing hard on those technologies. The vendor's recent releases of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003 were aimed partly at broadening the adoption of those two storage systems, especially among SMBs.

But it's desktop and enterprise disk drives that will account for about 35 percent of VARs' storage revenue this year.

"We're seeing a gradual shift away from tape-based backup," says Lenny Monsour, director of product management at SunGard Availability Services in Wayne, Pa. "Decreasing networking costs make it easier to back up your data remotely, which means customers don't have to deal with tape."