* Small business storage options getting better
In Texas, we say “the big’uns eat the little’uns” while talking about football teams. And big companies eat, er acquire, little companies, and that’s the storage news today.
Netgear, longtime major player in consumer and small business networking products just acquired Infrant Technologies, according to this May 3 press release. I’ve reviewed several Infrant units, and said nice things about the ReadyNAS NV a year ago.
In contrast, I felt the Netgear Storage Central SC101 included some interesting technology but applied that expertise to the wrong market. Home and small business users couldn’t see the value of advanced storage control at the price of adding extra disk control driver software to every client computer. The best thing about the SC101 was the extruded aluminum heat sink that allowed Netgear to keep the unit cool without a fan. Audiophiles should have jumped on that box for media storage because it was silent, something extremely few electronic components can claim. But no jumping followed, unfortunately for Netgear, which obviously started looking for an established network-attached storage name. With Infrant, Netgear gets an up and coming storage vendor with products SMBs appreciate.
The technology powering the Netgear SC101 came from Zetera – specifically, its Z-SAN (storage-area network) Technology. Zetera, which is now targeting its audience more cleverly and more directly, just announced its Networked Bunch of Disks (NBOD) Storage Solution for SMBs. NBOD plays off the storage technology called Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD), one of the ways you can organize storage devices with multiple drives.
Zetera’s been working behind the scenes for years, and now sells its products direct and through resellers. Two clever innovations make Zetera interesting for small business use: you can add capacity to existing volumes without reformatting the volume (and restoring all your data), and you can spread volumes across multiple hardware storage devices.
The first feature eases the hassle you encounter when trying to add capacity to traditional storage systems. SANs, the high-end storage devices filling corporate data centers, can do this, but high prices and high complexity keep those out of reach for most small businesses. Zetera provides this upgrade flexibility and other high-end advantages without the high-end pricing.
The second feature allows larger businesses, or at least those businesses with larger storage requirements, to provide themselves a bit of hardware fault tolerance by spreading storage volumes across physically separated storage devices. As long as all the storage units are on the same network subnet, you can spread a RAID volume across two or more physical disk devices holding multiple disks each.
RAID-5 spreads data across four disks in such a way that your data remains safe if one of the four disks dies. With Zetera, you can spread this across the four corners of your business if you want. If something dreadful happens, like the water sprinklers go off in one corner of the building, your data in the other three corners would remain safe and usable.
These more advanced storage configurations require experience to implement, making Zetera’s move to set up a reseller channel good news. Intelligent data-storage management long ago grew beyond the idea of adding another drive to a server, and tools like Zetera really push the storage boundary into advanced technology without advancing your budget too much. You still need special storage driver software, but now that software can be on a server in front of the Zetera systems rather than on every client computer.
Sabio Digital is another storage company that didn’t generate much interest when it tried to sell directly to consumers and is now moving toward a reseller network. Sabio Digital’s CM4 offered good value but needed more seasoning when I reviewed it last year, and they called to tell me the new version and new sales approach soothes the aggravations I had with the product.
I’m testing one of the units now and the company did clean up the storage administrator interface, although not quite enough for a consumer’s first external storage device. But resellers installing the units for customers will have no trouble with the streamlined administration screens and configuration pages.
Thanks to various government regulations, companies will soon find they need help from specialized storage vendors to archive e-mail and other information that now must be kept. Many companies who happily deleted files in the past now know (or should know) the new word for delete has become non-changeable archive. Luckily, storage companies remain at least a half-step ahead of the government agencies so intent on “helping” us manage our data.
