Storage Giants Seek Smaller Image

SANs are the cornerstone of most large enterprise IT infrastructures. But thanks to a new crop of products that simplifies the deployment of storage networks, a growing number of VARs are focusing their attention on SMBs.

SMB customers are more open to deploying their first SANs for numerous business reasons. The most prominent is an increased volume of data making direct-attached storage difficult to manage and placing a great risk to even a small company from a business-continuity standpoint. New regulations and less tolerance for business interruption also are motivating businesses to deploy storage networks. And vendors are heeding the call.

"We are an enterprise storage integrator, and we don't spend sales cycles selling [to the SMB], but when our current vendors, like Hitachi and Sun, give us the ability to address this market, it's a great, new opportunity," says Mark Teter, CTO at Denver-based Advanced Systems Group. "They have created bundles that let you easily build entry-level SANs."

Indeed, while the major OEMs have targeted SMBs for some time, their latest solutions, which come bundled with turnkey tools, are attracting VARs as well.

"I don't think anyone has done it effectively until now," says Kevin Regan, COO and vice president of sales at Regan Technologies, Cheshire, Conn. "I think the SMB [customer] is going to be a huge growth market for storage integrators for the next three years."

Indeed, storage spending among midsize customers will increase at a CAGR of 18 percent between 2003 and 2008, according to AMI-Partners, a market research firm that tracks SMB activity. Growth among smaller businesses is pegged at a CAGR of 15.3 percent. Besides the growing need, the newest crop of wares from the major vendors, including EMC (and partner Dell), Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and IBM, are making it more feasible for partners to focus their efforts on smaller customers.

The key breakthrough, Regan says, is price. EMC's AX100 RAID-based storage array, for example, costs roughly $10,000 and is focused at SMBs, not a segment EMC was typically associated with. Last month, IBM also began shipping its TotalStorage DS300 and DS400 entry-level storage systems. The DS300, which starts at $3,000, is a workgroup storage subsystem that supports iSCSI, allowing customers to implement the SAN on existing IP networks. The DS400 is a 2-Gb Fibre Channel system also intended for midsize businesses and workgroups.

Then there's HP's new SAN-in-a-box offering, the $10,000 MSA1000 Small Business SAN Kit, aimed at customers looking to migrate from direct-attached storage. The kit comes with a 2-Gb Fibre Channel disk array, two QLogic SANblade HBAs and an eight-port Fibre Channel QLogic SANbox Switch in a single box. It is designed to let VARs consolidate storage residing on distributed servers onto a SAN, simplify data management and provide data protection, says Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for HP's SAN division.

"The reason that most small and [midsize] businesses today have yet to adopt storage-area networks is because of the perceived cost and complexity," Fitze says. "[With] a few mouse clicks and less than an hour [with this kit], you can do what used to take...generally the greater part of the day for a typical, experienced SAN customer to deploy."

On the higher end of the starter-kit spectrum, HDS is shipping the new Thunder 9520V workgroup modular storage system. Priced in the $22,000 to $24,000 range, this array is different from past attempts to target the SMB in that, rather than designing it as a low-end system, HDS downsized its higher-end Thunder systems. The base module, available with single or dual controllers, scales up to 13 TB of SATA storage; a total of 59 drives support most of the software that runs on those offerings, notes Karen Sigman, HDS' vice president of global channels.

"We should have been leveraging our strength from the enterprise space that we're known for, because a lot of those same problems are down in the SMB space, like consolidation, backup and recovery," Sigman says. "Those things are really becoming more of an issue for the SMB customer. But the problem was our packaging of our product, and the way we put it all together as a solution wasn't taking advantage of all of those capabilities and designed at a price point and packaged for the SMB."

That simplification is based on SAN Starter Kits that HDS is enabling for channel partners selling the 9520V. The vendor has conducted interoperability testing with multiple SAN switching vendors and has certified the 9520V with Brocade's SilkWorm 3252, an eight-port, entry-level fabric switch that comes with a setup wizard and GUI-based tools aimed at simplified setup; the Emulex LP101 HBA with an auto-configuration tool; and McData's Spheron 4500 eight-port fabric switch. Software support includes the Hitachi Resource Manager, Hitachi ShadowImage In-System Replication, Copy-on-Write software (formerly known as QuickShadow) and Cross-System Copy (previously HiCopy).