All-in-ones aim for all SMBs

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.

data centre servers & storage storage yellow