Storage Resellers Profit From Customization Options

No longer is it necessary to settle for an industry-standard motherboard inside a nondescript chassis running Microsoft Windows or some Linux operating system to manage a few hard drives.

Instead, vendors and custom-system builders are serving customers and solution providers a growing range of hardware and software options.

One of the biggest changes, custom storage system builders said, is in the increasing need for high-performance storage servers.

Those storage systems are increasingly built for high-end applications such as video, said Joe Swanson, president of Rorke Data Inc., an Eden Prairie, Minn.-based custom-system and storage builder.

It is a market where performance for tasks such as video storage, broadcasting, editing and surveillance is measured in terms of bandwidth, not IOs per second, Swanson said. Rorke Data customizes the entire system including the chassis, CPU, memory, cooling, types of controllers and which hard drives to use.

"Customers are looking for a lot of cost-effective storage now that prices have dropped," Swanson said.

For some applications, custom storage arrays is the only way to go, said Stephen Monteros, COO of Linear Systems, a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based integrator of image management systems for police departments.

"Name-brand vendors' storage products are designed to work in certain environments," Monteros said. "In police departments, they're often not kept in those environments. And custom systems are more flexible."

Linear Systems' storage arrays are built by a third-party custom-system builder to very strict requirements, Monteros said. For instance, he said his company looks closely at the quality and the mean time before failure rating of the chassis' fans, as the arrays are typically kept in a rack sitting in an evidence room instead of in a climate-controlled data center.

Also, Monteros said, he knows the capacity requirements will double in the near future, and so his company carefully scrutinizes the storage controllers. "We throw questions to vendors like, 'How do you upgrade the firmware? How do you upgrade capacity? Do you have a schema for doubling the number of ports quickly? ' " he said.

Other custom-system builders, including Burnsville, Minn.-based Nor-Tech and Fremont, Calif.-based Amax Information Technologies, are focusing on high-end products such as clustered storage solutions.

Todd Swank, vice president of marketing at Nor-Tech, said that demand for custom storage in general is growing fast. For high-end storage devices for use in clustered environments, it might take two to three months from the time the company decides to build a solution to the time it is ready.

"We want to look at what applications customers will integrate with our storage, and what features we need to offer," Swank said. "We don't have the size and marketing dollars to compete against companies like EMC."

The bulk of custom storage sales for those builders, however, comprise more industry-standard products.

Nor-Tech recently released its new Voyageur Storage Server line, which it customizes to meet the requirements of other solution providers. The Voyageurs come in a 2U chassis with room for eight SATA drives and a 500-watt power supply, and a 3U chassis with room for up to 16 SAS or SATA drives and a 650-watt power supply. Both use Intel quad-core Xeon processors and a custom-built NAS or iSCSI operating system, and come with a three-year warranty, Swank said.

"As a company, we have to have a base offering," he said. "Each customer has specific requirements. But it's still nice to point to a base product. We tell customers, 'Here's what we have, what do you want that's different?' We're not rigid in our product offerings."

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