10 red hot enterprise tech for SMB customers

A rich harvest of enterprise-class hardware and software is ready for selling to small and medium businesses. Despite smaller budgets their needs are often very similar.

CRN spoke to resellers, analysts and vendors to find out what's new, exciting and affordable for Australian small and medium businesses.

Storage

The exponential rise in data is forcing SMBs to larger hard drive sizes. Luckily, storage vendors have been breaking through price barriers to bring smart storage to a wider market.

Oracle's Sun unified storage 7000 series is a mid-range NAS box with a very low price, says Kevin McIsaac, an IBRS analyst. It is highly automated, which makes it simple to manage, and it uses flash storage for caching read and write activity, so SMBs can use high-capacity, low-cost SAS or SATA drives and still get good performance.

The 7000 system comes with enterprise features such as inline deduplication, compression and Fibre Channel.
Smart storage doesn't require moving to Fibre Channel. Several vendors have had success selling iSCSI-based systems that draw on existing networking skills within smaller businesses. "ISCSI has gained quite a lot of traction in the SMB arena," says Phil Sargeant, Gartner's research vice president for data centre technologies.

Dell has enjoyed success with its iSCSI-equipped Equalogic range. The vendor has quadrupled sales since it acquired the niche storage company at the end of 2008. Equalogic brought the iSCSI interface "to the masses" at an affordable price, Jay Turner, Dell's head of channels in Australia, says.

NetApp has also made simplicity a calling card for its entry-level FAS2000 series storage. "It's incredibly simple to manage for SMB environments," McIsaac says.

Network-based storage from SMB vendors such as Netgear, D-Link, Qnap, Buffalo and Iomega is rushing to meet small business demands.

"These vendors are probably not household names but they are providing quite healthy NAS-type systems," Sargeant says. These include dual power, dual Ethernet and RAID for fallback and resilience.

"They are features that wouldn't have appeared a couple of years ago in products of that ilk," Sargeant says.

One vendor worth considering for the higher end of SMB is Compellent. The "virtualised storage" vendor sells its hardware with perpetual software licences which means that customers can upgrade firmware and not forklift in later models.

Another advantage is that Compellent only sells one model which scales from 4TB to several petabytes, and it uses the ZFS open source file system.

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