Drives for dollars, tape for cents

Every year the analysts wheel out two numbers - one soaring the other plummeting - that underline storage's quickening momentum: the amount of storage in the world and the per GB price of disk and tape space.

But while hard drives remain the prime example of commoditisation, the maturation of storage technologies has also led to cheaper methods of manufacturing and greater convergence in software and hardware, therefore leading to dramatic price falls.

Features once only found in enterprise-level products are now popping up in the more affordable SMB catalogue.

The end result is that an SMB can now enjoy higher levels of protection for their data at budget prices.

Although there is a myriad of features from enterprise-level storage shaken down into SMB, the most valuable is not among them: simplicity. Even if a product comes with a feature that is going to save time and money, it must be easy enough to use, otherwise, like early examples of firewalls, they will not be activated or used effectively.

Integrators rushing to share the latest wonderful advances in storage need to pause first and choose the ones that are the easiest to use, rather than those with the greatest number of features.

In some cases the drive for simplicity is refashioning the way storage vendors look at selling storage. The end user is more likely to be a secretary or accountant and not an IT-trained employee whose only purpose is to manage the company's IT requirements, as in the enterprise.

The value of hardware, software and services in the SMB storage market is virtually impossible to put a figure on and no quantifiable numbers exist, according to researcher IDC's Graham Penn.

Not only is the market very difficult to define, but there is precious little feedback from resellers to vendors about the type of customers who are buying their products. Furthermore the small businesses in the SMB field buy erratically every four years, which makes trends even harder to spot.

What Penn can say with confidence is that the medium end of the SMB storage market is maturing and becoming more open to storage appliances, particularly the new generation of products. And resellers and vendors approached for this feature have definitely enjoyed success in selling towards the SMB market.

New developments

There are three major advances in storage, says Penn. Within the past eight months vendors have released products able to mix fibre-channel and ATA drives within the same array for a blend of high capacity and high performance, giving SMBs more options at cheaper prices.

The two other developments centre on the themes of security and continuous data protection.

Security covers the gamut of virus and hacker protection, encryption, physical access, access authorisation to data and biometrics - a raft of opportunities for storage resellers to insure that their customers' data is protected in every meaning of the term at every stage of its lifecycle.

Continuous data protection is a concept that has filtered down from the enterprise and is similar to information lifecycle management or ILM. Businesses are required to save data for longer periods - even a small doctor's surgery must keep patient files for 100 years or more - and migrating that data through hardware and software upgrades, as well as backups and archives, can be an enormous task requiring detailed planning.

"There is a greater awareness of the cost of managing all the information that a business has to store or manage," says Penn.

One argument that loomed large in storage - network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) - has fallen by the wayside. Most arrays now can be configured as SAN or NAS or both, with iSCSI or fibre channel also co-existing in the one system and configurable on the fly. Network Appliance, the world's biggest NAS vendor, now does not have a single NAS-only device, Penn notes.

"It's totally irrelevant to talk about 'NAS versus SAN'. You're better off asking, 'What am I trying to do?'" Penn says.

Making the pitch

Once a company has passed a certain size, separating storage from servers is economically smart and makes maintenance and upgrades a lot simpler. The difficulty is knowing when that point has been reached.

An SMB's requirements can vary wildly and are not necessarily related to head counts or server counts. A small number of people, at a law firm for example, could require much larger and more complex storage arrangements than a manufacturing plant that employs more than a hundred staff.

Even defining an SMB in these terms can cause problems. Within three years of launching its assault on SMB storage, Acer has managed to take the number two position in Australia (behind HP) for the non-Unix platform. Bert Noah, director of Acer's Enterprise Systems Group, says Acer's resellers follow a flowchart assessment that looks at the number of servers, the frequency of backup and other business requirements to assess the situation.

As a rule of thumb, "if they have less than four servers it won't be economical," Noah says. However, if the hardware is in multiple formats, the backup takes more than eight hours and more capacity is needed, separate storage is better. Acer emphasises customer sign-offs at each stage of the process to guarantee accuracy in setting scope and fulfilling the project's goals.

Acer is launching its first co-branded storage products with HDS this year. Noah attributes the vendor's success to heavy investment in the channel and training, and maintaining a straightforward perspective. "We are just doing the basics right," Noah says.

One attraction to allay SMBs' fears when buying separate storage for the first time is the 90-day money-back guarantee. The guarantee has been very popular but has never been taken up by any customers, according to Noah.

Another successful strategy has been investing in training and education - not of resellers, but customers. SMBs must commit one person to a day's free training in the operation and maintenance of their new gear, which Noah claims results in fewer tech support calls.

"Technology has been a commodity for a long time. It's only spinning disks," says Noah. The skill in a sale is handing over knowledge to the customer and ensuring they are comfortable with the new technology.

Two models, the WMS100 and AMS200, account for 80 percent of Acer's sales, with the AMS500 accounting for the other 20 percent. The devices come with both fibre channel and iSCSI, giving SMBs the flexibility and economy combined with potential expansion down the high-speed, high-performance route.

Noah has some useful advice against overselling support, which can unnecessarily inflate the final bill and panic SMBs considering separate storage. Some vendors insist that customers need 24x7 support with two-hour response times, implying that anything less would be irresponsible towards the safety of all-important company data.

In the face of this scare mongering, Noah asks: "Is the customer prepared to wait at midnight on Friday for the tech guy to fix something? In most cases, probably not. It can wait."

A 10-hour, five-days-a-week support plan is generally sufficient and passes on substantial savings to the customer. The price of technology has fallen so much that even a small SMB can have a disaster recovery site. An ADSL link to a server at home can store critical data like the payroll, for example. And the same can work in reverse. Noah points out a recent sale to the Catholic Education Office, which now backs up 70 schools to the main data centre, removing the need for 70 tape drives, tapes and basic IT competency in 70 school principals.

IDC's Penn singles out the branch office as a big opportunity for storage resellers. Price falls now make it feasible for an SMB to manage branches from a single point such as a main data centre by using file accelerators or wide-area file services and compressing data before sending it over the wire.

Relying on the front desk of each branch office to load the tape and start the back-up has "proven to be non-viable", Penn says.

Watching an SMB's use of servers is the best way to broach the topic of storage, agrees EMC's Jordan Riezes, marketing director for Australia and New Zealand. SAN was once too complicated but now technologies like iSCSI mean a reseller can raise storage as an option without introducing a new layer of cost and complexity. Throwing more servers at a business when space is running out only contributes to inefficient use of storage.

Riezes says iSCSI makes a lot of sense for SMBs buying their first SAN. Gigabit Ethernet is much cheaper, easier to build and is an already-familiar technology for SMB tech staff. In many cases its slower speed - half the speed of the minimum for fibre channel - is not likely to be a concern. "If you've only got four servers talking to [your storage], does it really matter?"

ISCSI is not standard yet but is available as an option on many EMC products.

EMC launched its SMB-focused Insignia brand in January this year with the Clariion AX100 and AX150. The AX100 holds 1-6TB and comes with dual power supplies, dual controllers and can run for 96 hours on its battery - a useful feature if the power fails after the last person leaves on Friday.

On the software side, EMC's Retrospect backup application can give SMBs greater levels of assurance in protecting their data. The program encrypts on the fly to tape or DVD backup, which can save embarrassing faces or ward off corporate espionage when the backup is stolen or goes missing.

JosŽ Goldmann from Queensland-based distributor SLi Consulting believes that for networking storage over directly attached, the server threshold is as low as two. "For an SME that has two or more servers and wants to run a more efficient shop, then a SAN is an excellent option and not that expensive." Goldmann notes that SLi's assessments are based on a pure investment perspective without taking ROI or TCO into account.

SLi sells storage arrays under its own brand, Storage Network; the storage arrays are rebadged from Xyratex, the world's largest storage manufacturer by capacity last year. Significant advances in technology pricing are bringing faster, better-priced storage to the medium end of SMBs, Goldmann says.

Fibre channel speeds are moving up to 4Gb/s from 2Gb/s but the price has remained the same. Goldmann says some vendors may price the 4Gb/s products higher to clear inventory, but this is unnecessary.

The ability to combine SAS (serially attached SCSI) and SATA drives within the one array is also delivering large price-performance increases. SAS drives spin at 15,000 rpm for extremely fast access speeds, while the slower SATA are a quarter to a fifth cheaper per GB.

Although iSCSI is making inroads as the poor man's network, fibre channel guarantees point-to-point reliability, security and speed. Arrays are now arriving with eight ports rather than the average four, which can remove the need for a separate fibre-channel switch.

Box builders are finding they can do more for less these days. After importing NAS boxes from Taiwan, Queensland-based Datastor has decided to build its own using an Open-e module that plugs into a good quality motherboard. The Open-e technology, well established in Europe, comes loaded with a Linux operating system and not only offers greater customisation - Datastor can assemble units with more than one processor and memory to spec - but better service, says managing director John Couvaras.

The distributor can supply extra power supplies or other parts in the field rather than requiring the NAS box be shipped to Korea. "The advantage is that if something goes wrong in the box we have spares here, not overseas," says Couvaras. He hopes to sell more than 100 boxes in the first 12 months from the June launch. "Any new venture is not without risks, but our experience and history has told us that this is required."