* Vendors finally providing new technologies to the SMB market
The SMB marketplace requires simple solutions and now, at last, vendors are providing this segment with some new technologies – many quite sophisticated – and coupling them with simple installation procedures and simplified user interfaces. Today, some thoughts on how this is likely to affect storage purchasing.
Part of my definition of SMB is that the segment consists of companies lacking storage specialists on their IT staff (if they even have an IT staff). In such cases, simple, automated environments work best, and the ability to provide simple-to-use, automated management tools and hardware will be critical to any vendor wanting to crack this market. An example of a solution well-suited for this group is the new crop of file-based continuous data protection (CDP) packages, most of which offer “set it and forget it” capability. Such packages – particularly if they have no requirement for help desk involvement when it’s time to do recoveries – are likely candidates to provide full-featured data protection with minimal operational drag. I expect to see lots of this in the coming months as the user interfaces continue to improve and the marketplace comes to a better understanding of just what CDP is all about.
More noticeable will be some significant changes in hardware purchasing.
Previously, SMBs have on occasion invested in JBODs (Just a Bunch of Disks), but the care and feeding of RAID boxes typically required too much expertise for many small shops. With disk drives being further commoditized (the exceptions are the high-end 15K RPM devices) and with relatively cheap cabinetry now available, it’s a good bet that many SMB sites will start bringing on RAIDs in the near future to take advantage of the substantially better data protection that such devices offer. Expect these new arrays to run RAID levels 0, 1, 10 and 5, and to be populated mainly with SATA drives.
Perhaps most significantly, while many of those arrays will still be directly attached to their servers, a significant portion will also be networked, allowing SMBs to use their storage more efficiently. This is a significant shift in buying patterns, with the exception of ultra-cheap NAS devices, SMBs have historically been very slow to adopt networked storage – and why not? SANs in particular have been a bear to install, manage and maintain, and even iSCSI isn’t really as simple as we would like it to be. But all that is changing fast and easy to install networked storage with basic management capabilities is becoming more generally available from a number of vendors.
Some final comments on this next week.
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In a few weeks, it will be time to publish my sixth (good grief!) annual letter to Santa with my pan-segmentarian storage wish list. Much of the input for this comes from my readers.
This is an opportunity for you to tell the vendors what you would like to see from them in the coming year. If you want to make a point, zing a vendor, or just engage in some healthy venting, e-mail a list of the things you’d like to see from the storage vendors some time during the next two weeks. If you don’t contribute, you have no right to complain. If you do… well, who knows what you might find under your blade server on the big day?
