All-in-ones aim for all SMBs

It happened to the MP3 player, and now it's happening to the storage appliance. The age of the moulded-plastic, multi-functional device is coming and storage, at least for SMBs, is unlikely to remain the same stuffy conversation about hard drives, arrays and controllers.

Storage vendors are racing to bring out a new range of appliances that cram more than the usual four disks and controller into consumer-friendly packaging.

Not just consumer friendly but actually visually appealing, a totally foreign concept to storage vendors - at least until now. When was the last time you heard a tech website describe a NAS as "cute"?

The first arrival is a NAS box with the catchy moniker Yellow Machine, and although opinions may vary as to its looks it is without doubt the first of its kind to grace the pages of the New York Times' IT section.

The safety-vest yellow box contains “a lot of features in a toaster-sized box for marketing to get their head around,” says Dez Blanchfield, CEO of distributor Cradle Technologies. An eight-port Ethernet switch, double firewall (enterprise-grade) and VPN make it much more potent than the typical budget products in the SMB range, which often tend to be neutered versions of their older brothers.

The Yellow Machine's NAS capabilities are a fairly standard affair: RAID 0, 1 and 5, with 5 the default setting giving a useable capacity of 647GB for the 1TB base configuration. The box is fully integrated with UPSes and can shut itself down cleanly in the event of a power failure.

The Yellow Machine also pays its keep with a slew of additional features. It is a mail server, acting as an email proxy that also captures and backs up all email, whether POP, IMAP or SMTP, without noticeable delay on delivery.

The eight-port switch is a useful router, although most SMBs are likely to already have one in the office already. The box is also VPN capable, one useful option that an SMB may not yet have encountered.

Two features are surprising additions given that they normally make their appearance in the more expensive appliances. File system journaling is employed to speed up recovery times and disk scrubbing utilises the disks to their maximum efficiency by shifting data between the four and providing an early warning when one shows signs of looming failure.

The basic Yellow Machine comes with four 250GB disks for RRP $2295, which is the most attractive price point, says John Robinson, country manager for Anthology Solutions, the maker of the Yellow Machine. Two bigger versions using 400GB and 500GB disks for 1.6TB and 2TB respectively are much more expensive - the 2TB unit is more than double the price of the base configuration but this is only due to the dearness of the disks, says Robinson.

Thanks to a strong relationship with EMC, Anthology Solutions is bundling the storage vendor's Retrospect Pro free with each unit. The licence covers five clients and additional spots can be added for a 15 percent discount off regular pricing.

The slick marketing and colour of the Yellow Machine are attracting a lot of attention. Robertson was still a little breathless after manning a stall for two days of interrogation during CeBit Australia. Fate landed the Anthology stall in a choice location surrounded by software vendors that had little on display, and the Yellow Machine had no problems drawing a crowd, says Robertson.

One Western Australian reseller working with Cradle Technologies did a simple mail-out to 3500 customers and received 130 expressions of interest, says Blanchfield. “We didn't expect the product to go as well as it has,” he admits, and now the NAS box is the distributor's flagship product.

Cradle is investing heavily in training its 744 resellers and is about to announce the signing of a tier-two integrator which can field another 600 field technicians.

It is difficult to report on anything else in this category at this stage because Anthology has beaten the rest of the field to market, in Australia at least. “You will see a reasonable number of products from vendors later this year,” promises IDC's Graham Penn, but he refuses to disclose what features these products contain nor the vendors that are releasing them.

Network Appliance is one vendor that is likely to move down into the SMB market. Its cheapest product, the FAS250, starts at $15,000 for 1TB configuration, but Mark Heers, marketing director Australia New Zealand, Network Appliance says a "sub$10,000" product will arrive before the end of year.

The FAS250's features give an indication of what SMBs will be able to purchase within the next 12 months as competition forces the price of technology downwards.

Snapshot, which saves an instant image of a database or large file at regular intervals, provides extremely fast recovery.

The FAS250 can take a snapshot every minute, says Heers, but it is most commonly programmed to record every hour with only the last three hours saved. If a mistake is made or the file corrupts, the user can roll back to the previous version almost instantly.

An automatic back-up of Exchange or other applications is also easily searchable, allowing a single email or mailbox can be retrieved without having to pull out the entire back-up.

A third feature, Snaplock, locks down data and makes it unalterable. This niche application will go unnoticed by SMEs outside important vertical markets such as legal and finance. Regulations requiring the storage of title deeds or financial advice make unalterable documents essential.

NetApp's appliance will suit SMBs with ambitious expansion plans as all their products operate identically and range from 1TB through to more than 500TB.

In the US there are several contenders such as the Buffalo TeraStation or Infrant ReadyNAS which offer 1TB in similar form factors, however they lack extra features such as hotswapping drives, a router and VPN that make them more than tidy NAS boxes.

All-in-one appliances lessen the number of bottlenecks, potential break points and installation time compared to a network of single-purpose devices. But while the set-up may be less complicated, it is generally beyond the abilities of most SMBs to program them effectively.

Blanchfield claims that it takes just five minutes to set up a Yellow Machine to deliver simple storage, but he adds that the average person “won't necessarily get all the benefits and features in there.”

To put it plainly, all-in-one appliances will save SMBs money but will still require the services of resellers for implementation and support.

Cradle has enlisted a finance partner to offer financing and turn storage for SMBs into an operational rather than capital expense, like the corporate market.

Blanchfield envisions that the box bundled with services can be sold for $5000, or $138 a month for three years.

All-in-one appliances can bring enormous savings but they are also a riskier proposition when something goes wrong. If your NAS box is not just storage but also the router, VPN and mail server, any downtime is going to cost an SMB dearly.

Another drawback is that SMBs that only use all-in-ones for their storage and ignore the trimmings such as VPN and email back-up are paying more money for a straightforward NAS.

Multi-function appliances are "not such a good investment of capital," says IDC's Penn. Instead he advocates products that use small blades or racks to add extra functions as needed and that can be replaced for repair or upgrade.

Anthology's Robinson dismisses these concerns. Cradle is offering extended warranties on-site beyond the Yellow Machine's 12-month standard warranty, and there is a 24x7 toll-free number to a US call centre as well as email support. The Seagate disks, the most likely points of failure according to Robinson, are also covered by their own five-year warranty. He further claims that there has been a failure rate of less than 0.1 percent and that most "things can be fixed without returning the product to base". Blanchfield maintains that the retail price of the Yellow Machine is well priced next to a plain box. “If you take a regular PC and put four big disks and it doesn't give you much change from $5000.”

The Yellow Machine's features and relatively low price do come at a cost, however. IDE disks are used, not SATA, and the built-in router is only 10/100 Ethernet. Robinson believes that most SMBs will not notice the difference. A newer model with SATA disks, more memory, a faster processor and Gigabit Ethernet is due in the fourth quarter, hopefully by October, says Robinson.