SMB storage explosion

Adaptec last year purchased Snap Appliance and has built up its product line to offer flexibility and power at lower cost to SMBs.

"You can now get up to 3TBs of storage with very powerful software that gives SMBs functionality only previously available for 10 times the cost," says a company spokesperson.

Nexsan Technologies -- an ATA/SATA-based storage specialist -- acquired AESign Evertrust at the end of March, giving them new strength in the ‘information lifecycle management’ (ILM) space.

A statement from Nexsan says it will integrate Evertrust’s ILM, content addressed storage (CAS) and compliance capabilities.

"The combination of Nexsan and Evertrust will enable Nexsan to offer ILM, including scalable low priced disk storage, as a single integrated system," Nexsan says.

Quantum has also been shopping. "A month ago we bought another company Certance. Certance was Seagate’s tape drive division spinoff. The Certance acquisition now makes Quantum the largest tape drive manufacturer in the world and the largest supplier of tape automation solutions in the world," says Quantum’s A&NZ country manager, Craig Tamlin. "We position ourselves as data protection, backup, recovery and archive hardware providers."

Gartner has been keeping its eye on the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions, and Sargeant believes it’s not the last of them.

Quantum's Tamlin: Scoping storage needs is not a trivial process

EMC is gobbling up other companies primarily in the software and services arena to bulk up their storage portfolio.The acquisition of Legato and Documentum are prime examples. EMC also bought Dantz.

"Dantz addresses the backup and restore for SMBs. EMC previously bought Legato but Legato was primarily associated with enterprise so there was a gap in their portfolio in the SMB space. Suddenly they go and buy Dantz to plug that [gap]," he says.

More of those kinds of acquisitions can be expected. With Symantec buying Veritas however, that surprised Sargeant and it surprised the market, he says. "Veritas to me was always a major player in the storage software arena, and to suddenly have a security vendor buy them up…they obviously saw the synergies of product there without too much overlap.

Sargeant expects strategic buy-ups to continue; however, maybe not on the same large scale as Symantec and Veritas.

As for what the implications are for local channel partners following the Veritas/Symantec melding,Veritas is staying mum.

"All I can say at the moment is that our two companies are separate. We’re currently going through regulatory approval for the merger, so it’s not appropriate for me to talk about differences to our channel programs and going to market model," says Veritas’ regional alliance and channel director Archie Wilson.

"All I can say is that the companies have obviously got to look at the integration at some stage and look at harmonising the [channel] programs between the two companies as a combined entity," he says.


Which storage?

With acronyms galore, it’s no wonder SMBs have a hard time sorting out what they mean, let alone which to apply to their business.

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Gartner’s Sargeant says it’s horses for courses. "NAS addresses a part of their need and SAN addresses another part of their need. You don’t generally just buy one to address it all."

He says NAS has grown up over the past two or three years and it can do a number of things it couldn’t then. Two or three years ago SMBs looked at SAN and said ‘It’s too expensive for me, all the infrastructure, all the storage arrays; it’s out of my league. But now costs have come down, SMBs can seriously look at SAN solutions, Sargeant says.

"And now particularly iSCSI as a technology has grown up and it offers another option, but it may not provide the total solution so I see organisations having a mixture," he says.

NetApps’ Heers says there’s no real rule of thumb as to whether you use SAN versus NAS versus iSCSI. "The main thing today is to try to get people weaned off server-based storage and make sure they go to network storage which allows them improved scaling.Whether they do SAN or NAS or iSCSI, it’s not important so long as you get away from dependency between servers and storage."

Companies are looking more closely at their IT spending and want to get more out of their existing storage hardware infrastructure. Sharing storage is the way to go, says José C Goldmann from SLI Consulting.

"If you have two or more servers and we need to expand storage on those servers, then a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) SAN is more effective then attaching storage externally the traditional way," he says.

Quantum’s Tamlin says scoping clients’ storage needs is not a trivial process. "A few years ago, people were out there deploying NAS products all over the place and now I don’t see a lot of it. They’re buying NAS products more for quick-and-dirty storage, but companies that do it properly are buying true fibre channel SAN solutions for centralised management, good performance, and because they’re more affordable now," he says.