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.

data centre servers & storage storage yellow