* It appears that small businesses are just too small for some storage vendors
One of the first things many small children learn is that sharing is a good thing. This makes for nicer people, happy families and quieter siblings. Many business people and IT managers find value in sharing as well. When it is time to collaborate on a development project or have several people access a database, there isn’t much that beats shared data as a way to increase efficiency.
Networked storage – both storage-area networks and network-attached storage – now provides many companies with faster, shared throughput. Virtualize that networked storage and IT managers find they also maximize the heck out of disk usage and have a more manageable and efficient storage operation.
What a pity it is then that so few smaller businesses have afforded themselves the benefit of shared data. After all, smaller companies often must compete with much larger firms, many of which make IT investments that they feel will provide them with some competitive advantage.
Why are so many companies in this segment still locked-in to direct-attach storage? The issue, of course, is price.
There is an opportunity here for the vendors to offer some really useful service to the small and midsize business (SMB) segment, but until quite recently most have paid little more than lip service to building useful solutions for this segment. While a few companies have rolled out some pretty interesting iSCSI-based SAN solutions, and a few (Emulex comes to mind) have built Fibre Channel SAN technology suitable for smaller mid-tier companies, most packages aimed at SMBs are just too costly for much of the market they propose to serve. Look closely at many of these packages and you realize that the vendor’s definition of SMB often means “small enterprise,” or at best companies with between 100 and 1,000 servers. Not much help to a 50- or 100-person firm, I’m afraid.
Lately things have been getting a bit better. IBM recently introduced its DS400 package, a bundle that includes a Fibre Channel array and switch that starts out at under $17,000 with 500G bytes of storage, and EMC offers its Clariion AX100 with a dual-controller and four Fibre Channel HBAs for around $10,000. These offerings will clearly place some pressure on the iSCSI vendors, although you wouldn’t be unfair if you asked just how responsive smaller companies would be to learning Fibre Channel. Certainly, for the midsized IT operations that already have Fibre Channel infrastructure (and more importantly, Fibre Channel knowledge) in-house, these will be interesting alternatives.
Still though, not much help there for the smaller firms, needful though they may be. And yet… would your small business (or department in a large company) be interested in basic SAN capability, including a virtualized storage pool of half a terabyte, for under $400?
Next time I’ll tell you what I’ve found.
